Jeremy Brown wrote:
IIRC,Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
While your explanation of the birth of GNU/Linux is excellent, the above paragraphs are a crock. As far as I know and recall, only a very small part of the software market "used to have" those four freedoms. None of the early Unix variants that I recall were either Free (capitalized to mean open-source and with those freedoms) or free (with a price of zero).
I may be incorrect on my UNIX history, but my understanding was that during the early Bell labs years (especially before the explosion of personal computers) UNIX source was distributed with almost no regard for software licensing, and for "free" monetarily as well--or at most around the cost of media. Even after UNIX was copyrighted, relatively "free" implementations like BSD and Minix still existed.
Bell Labs /gave/ Unix to Berkeley ( now USC Berkeley) for educational use and that was the start of BSD.
AT&T kept the commercial development separate from that point and Berkely was free to modify anything they were originally given.
DOS was created by taking Minix and pulling out the parts that made a single pc able to boot and run. Early versions of DOS even had the Minix strings in the code. I saw that in the DOS 1 code using a hex editor. :-)
Jeremy
