----- Original Message ----- From: "John Bird" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "'NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List'" <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 12:56 PM Subject: RE: [DUG] Open source licences
> I am not up into the details of the GPL and various flavours of licences, > but from a long Unix background I understand the intent of them... > > Small history: > Unix was originally written by ATT and given openly to the computing world > to improve, resulting in many main flavours Berkely, SCO, Microsoft Xenix > (yes them too), IBM AIX, Novell etc. In 1984 I wrote to AT&T to ask the cost of a Unix licence. The answer was $800 if I was a degree-granting educational institution, otherwise $43,000. Microsoft, IBM and the others licenced their rights from AT&T and presumably paid through the nose. Before its "divestiture" in 1984 AT&T was a monopoly, restricted to operating the telephone system and doing government work. In the 1970s Unix spread through the universities but AT&T couldn't sell it at all. Unix "workalikes" popped up all over the place, and linux is based on one of those. Brian _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
