Worth mentioning also that in the early through mid 90s, projects hosted their own version control servers, but you needed an account on the development machine

Worth mentioning also that in the early through mid 90s, projects hosted their own version control servers, but you needed an account on the development machine to actually have access to the repo. Most people only had access to release tarballs, not the full history, and couldn’t (e.g.) make diffs against CVS head. OpenBSD developed anonymous CVS, which gave anybody the ability to get the full project history even if they weren’t a developer. (That’s actually where the “Open” in OpenBSD comes from—it refers not to the license, but the development process.) Here’s the anoncvs paper: https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf https://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf OpenBSD’s latest release song was actually about this topic: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#61 https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#61