--- On Wed, 4/1/09, Orlando Andico <[email protected]> wrote:
> but Bell Labs "shared" their innovations not out of > altruism, but because the anti-trust settlement between > AT&T and the US government forbade AT&T from selling > any computers or software, so Bell Labs "gave away" the > source code. You got your Unix history mixed up Orly. Very early in the development of Unix, all that Berkeley had to do was to go to Bell Labs and copy off the Unix source code on tape. This is how BSD started. And BSD grew even faster than SysV. So at the start, Unix was de facto open source, until 1993 when AT&T made Unix commercial, and from that time on, no one could look at the Unix source code without paying AT&T license fees. Bell Labs never gave away the source code because of the anti-trust settlement with the U.S. government. They could not, because at this time, Unix was already closed-source commercial software. Because of this closed-sourcing of AT&T Unix, Berkeley had to do a complete rewrite of the BSD kernel in order to come out with 4.0BSD, which did not have any AT&T source code in it. 4.0BSD became the precursor of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. ***Pablo Manalastas*** _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
