Ben Finney writes: > It would make your task of choosing a well-understood license easier > if you instead used "softwaree" in its original, > contrastted-with-hardware meaning, and not the narrow "programs only" > meaning that some retrofit to it.
After seeing this claim made quite a few times on various Debian lists, I was curious about the history for the claim above. The earliest common attribution of "software" that I could find in a computer context is to John Stukey: Today the "software" comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its "hardware" of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like. [ from http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_31_00.html ] Note the "carefully planned _interpretive_ (etc)" and "aspects of automative programming" parts of Tukey's definition. At least in that early, contrasted-with-hardware meaning, software was definitely not a general term for information, but a name for the instructions that produced function and results from a computer. Is there some earlier use of the word that is broader? Michael Poole -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]