@blinry Yep. That was one of the design goals. When the decision was made by Bill Gates to NOT support the OL;PC, it needed a new OS and UI. Which became SugarUI running on top of Fedora. Red Hat put in a bunch of engineers to help get it all up and running. It was a special time 😊 I still use working OLPCs for demos and workshops ;)

@blinry A "make this particular source code available" requirement is somewhat[0] baked into the AGPLv3 license, tons of discussion about showing code in use back then, I believe

Does PHP still have a "show the source code" option builtin?

[0] I think it's fully baked in, but it's been a long time since I looked at actual text of the license

@blinry incidentally, Lisp Machines took it a step further where you could inspect and modify code of your running applications, and see changes live.

It's really sad to see that modern environments still haven't caught up to that.

https://www.tfeb.org/fragments/2025/11/18/the-lost-cause-of-the-lisp-machines/

@blinry @enkiv2 Well there’s one at the bottom of every web site we make and all it takes is a link to a git remote somewhere :)

e.g. see footer of https://kitten.small-web.org/

Might be harder on native/proprietary platforms but I’d love to see this become a pattern that’s embraced on the web.

@blinry Yes, see Lisp Machines, OpenGenera, Medley Interlisp, McCLIM, or almost any Smalltalk dialect. You can glimpse this in Emacs+SLIME »presentations«.

The system is »live«, and you can inspect it directly. Typically, this goes down to individual widgets.

»Modern« machines have lost the connection to their source, and trying to recover it with heuristics and remote repositories will necessarily be only a distant shimmer of that connection.

@blinry

It originally ran Sqeak. Sqeak is a modern Smalltalk (though Pharo is positioning itself as a replacement). It was also inspired by the DynaBook, which was another of Alan Kay's projects.

Smalltalk environments all let you inspect both the source code and the state of running objects.

For Étoilé, we built a persistent object model with some common interfaces and the UI framework exposed the same introspection APIs, so you could attach an inspector to any object and see it in a generic way, but then attach an inspector to the UI for the model object, and then to that in turn and have inspectors all the way down (or up, or something).

@blinry oh oh oh talk to @EndlessAccess folks about this! They hold a defensive patent (which is usable by open source projects) for “Flip to Hack” which was this idea taken to the extreme as far as coolness goes.

I imagine @wjt, @ramcq, and maybe @chergert (because I think it used GNOME Builder?) could share some pointers to the history.

You'd roughly need to:

- Figure out which program is currently focused
- Figure out the Git repo of this software
- Clone it into a temporary directory
- Set up the required tools to start hacking on it and compile it

As a quick prototype, I wrote a li'l Bash script that does some of these things. It makes heavy use of #nix and #nixpkgs:

https://codeberg.org/blinry/view-source-button

I enters a "dev shell" with the required tools already in the PATH, and even sets up a Git remote to start contributing. :D