On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 19:44:50 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Perhaps historically as a guinea pig, but its use is waning for more permissive licenses, which have been around for decades too.
Well, they had been around for things like X11, which had a commercial consortium driving the development. X11 was just a reference implementation, and members got early access to it so that they could implement it in their proprietary X11 terminals before the general public got access to it...
But as (even public) universities were pressured to earn money from their research the heads higher up insisted on anti-commercial licensing. Only when GPL gained traction could the comp. sci. people start to push for something more liberal.
IIRC the most standard licensing was educational-use, non-commercial-use or public domain back then. People had to pay for their compilers and IDEs too... quite a lot... And phone bills from using BBSes. Shareware was a much more accepted concept at that point in time too... GPL changed the world quite significantly.
