>20 years ago there was no such thing as open source. Your instructors and their
>employer (the university) no doubt had limited ability to "share" ideas,
Oh please. You don't know anything.
20 years ago I was a junior at this institution, majoring in CS,
working as a student employee for the same department I work for today.
We were a field test site for Tops-20 from Digital. We had the source
to the OS and we contributed fixes back to the vendor. We were also
an IBM mainframe shop and still are. Others on campus were some of
the first Unix licensees on their PDP-11's running first the AT&T Bell
Labs releases and later the Berkeley releases.
We had operating system source code from IBM -- everybody did. It
wasn't until later that IBM came out with the OCO concept (Object Code
Only, which "cut the heart out of the VM teddy bear"). We wrote code
and freely distributed it to anyone who could use it as source code.
Management approved and encouraged this process because they knew that:
a) It made us look good to publish useful programs.
b) We got as much if not more back from the free sharing of hacks with our
peers worldwide. In fact, the IBM users group was (and still is)
called SHARE. Every year we looked forward to getting the latest
SHARE tape with free hacks on it, along with the Waterloo Tools Tape.
Similarly we had the DECUS tapes for the Tops-20 systems. Almost all
software was freely shared as source code. BWYTAPE was a well-know
tape utility for IBM mainframes that was on the SHARE tape, and
written at Columbia, whose SHARE "installation code" was BWY (for
Broadway, as in New York City). Similarly, all the early Internet
software (email, file transfer, telnet, etc.) was freely shared by the
ARPAnet crowd and their follow-ons. Sure there were some large
companies selling binary-only utilities, like SyncSort, etc.
Could a student plagiarize someone else's work? No. Could they use
other's work to derive a new piece of intellectual property? Duh,
it's called a Derived Work. No, people did not rewrite subroutine
libraries that already existed; they used them.
Did the buzz phrase "Open Source" exist in 1979? No. University and
Corporate/Government R&D labs were the place that paid people salaries
to give away their software.
Faculty not owning their intellectual property rights? That's very
recent and still very limited in scope.
Get some clue.
/a
