>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,
>I'll bet a month's salary that as a student you could not "own" any
>intellectual property while "working" at the educators faclilties nor could
>you take ideas, code, etc that was developed elsewhere, esle you would have
>been booted for cheating.
>
>Please submit to the group some proof of open source (in concept or working
>contract) existing 20 years ago.
>
Sure. Read the book "Hackers, Heros of a Computer Revolution" by Steven
Levy, 1994. The early chapters detail the birth of the hacker ethic at
MIT in the 60's. It wasn't called "Open Source" then (now a registered
service mark) and it wasn't a formal license like GPL (lawyers didn't
care about software then...oh, the good old days!) but every one of us
would recognize it as open source. No one bothered to put a copyright
notice on things then, so it was even more open and unrestricted than
Open Source is now.
In college in the 70's, everything I did (except for class assignments
before the due date) was open source. All the source code for utilities,
games, and other programs I wrote were available in a communal directory.
We all worked on each other's code. I learned a lot that way.
You are wrong about the restrictions about owning intellectual property.
No one thought in those terms in college. Software was a community
resource. I used lots of software from outside in those days, ARPAnet was
a wonderous thing. Cheating only applied to class assignments...sure, if
I turned in a program someone else wrote as a class assignment, that
would be cheating. Otherwise, it was accepted, even encouraged. As a
computer scientist, reading and modifing other programmer's code is an
important skill. You can keep your month's salary though, I don't need
it.
Even when I worked for Hughes Aircraft, as a Member of the Technical
Staff at Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, in the early 80's, there was
open source. There were some very strict Intellectual Property rules
there, but for some reason software was treated differently. Other than
the classified stuff I did, my code was available for any HRL user to see
(everyone set read permissions on everything) and I often exchanged
pointers with colleagues. We had a list where we would invite each other
to see what we had been doing. Learned a lot there too!
I checked the callbook, I'm only a few years older than you. I'm
surprised you thought open source was something new. It isn't, it is as
old as computers. The present emphasis on it is a backlash against those
who violated the hacker ethic. Hackers has a great chapter on the first
one to do that successfully, his name was Bill Gates. The rest is
history...
Steve K4HG
