The Old Days, re finding bugs

[John Gilmore]

In article <1194 at brl-tgr.ARPA>, brett at LOCUS.UCLA.EDU (Brett Fleisch) writes:
> What happened to the old days when people would pay you to find
> bugs?

What happened is that people started running Unix, which comes with as
many bugs as you care to find, and no support.

Since AT&T doesn't seem to do maintenance releases, preferring instead
to generate an entirely new version of Unix every time they make a
release, even if they do take the time to fix bugs (I don't know if
they do), the fixes don't make it into customers' hands for many years --
until each manufacturer decides to upgrade from "system 1 release 0"
(which they know and have hacked over til it mostly works) to "system 5
release 2 version 2" or whatever (which is an unknown).