Dennis is dead.
Brian is a professor at a big university, and has been for quite a while. He hasn't develop software in ages.
Ken went to work for Google for about a decade. I suspect he might be retired now, I'm not sure. I have heard that he used a Chromebook as his computer recently.
Seymour Cray worked on for-profit companies all his life, building faster and faster (and more and more specialized) computers. He died while still working, and never retired.
Seymour was talking to the Elves. Thats where his input came from.
And thats quite an interesting point. I don't think it matters much what these guys did before or after. I think it matters most that they were at the right place at the right time, and did something, maybe only once-in-a-lifetime, that really matters: to bring down something that exists only in the mind, an idea or vision, into something materialized; to be capable (by means of throughput) to channel that idea down and (by means of skill) pronounce it into something tangible. This is how visions become reality, this is how mankind evolves - and these are often one-time achievements and sometimes they may not even reach their true value during the lifetime of the creator.
In the case of unix, the achievement was to bring down the idea that a fully capable OS (i.e. multiuser, multitasking, timekeeping, filemanaging) can be created with the limited ressources of a mini. This led the way onwards, away from the concept that computers need to be big centralized things. Only from this point onwards the Internet-of-Things became already visible.
The achievement is NOT to build a perfectly functioning product, the achievement is to materialize the vision in a way that the further path becomes visible from there. It is not about usability; it is much more like
giving birth to something - and it is totally unrelated to marketability. (Our language knows about that, it idiomatically talks about the "hour or birth" of major achievements.)
don't know who you mean by Kirk and Eric. There are quite a few folks with that name.
Well, BSD Kirk (McKusick) and sendmail Eric (Allman).
(The latter's team managed once to actually get my bugfix into head within less than 24 hours. On other projects I occasionally had to discuss about the definition of "bug", for a year or longer.)
That is at least very debatable. The early Bell Labs versions of Unix were not very usable by either today's standards, nor by the standards of computer usage of that day. The same applies to the C and C++ languages. They only started their inexorable march to victory once the researchers (at Bell Labs and elsewhere) handed control and development to commercial entities, which added all the stuff to make them actually useful.
That depends a lot. I learned C from the original work of Kernighan/Richie and found it a very practical and delightful way to design a macro assembler: it was fun to build hardware and then have such a tool to talk to that hardware.
Now, don't get me wrong: Multics and Unix and Plan9, and C and C++ (and Java and Go) were great leaps in systems research. The folks who worked on them were (and in some cases still are) geniuses.
Thats what I'm saying.
I'm very honored to have met a few of them personally. But they were not great software engineers, nor great strategists for the computer industry.
The question is, why would I need the latter? When it comes to the industry, it just wants to reduce me to a functioning consumer, and preferrably one that buys rather stupid things. (The only thing that was commonly regarded as positive in this was that the computers become cheaper and more powerful in the process of marketing bad software.)
This now leads back to Your former post. I don't really know why the BSD licence is as it is. I might assume a reason in the fact that it is originally a product of an university, i.e. community (taxpayer) funded.
I also don't know what kind of opinion the FreeBSD community prefers to have about the industry. My own opinion is not very positive: the industry tends to prefer the most marketable thing over the technologically best, and the market is easily deluded. One could garnish this with any of the Dilbert clips; they perfectly depict the reality of business. What is desireable in such? It's just a ship of fools.