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Unix was neither open source nor free of charge. C won long before Linux came around.
by tntn 8y ago
Unix was neither open source nor free of charge. C won long before Linux came around.
- pjmlp 8y agoSure it was, just not with the FOSS licenses of today, apparently you are too young to remember. AT&T was forbidden to sell UNIX, so they provided the source code to universities at the symbolic price of $100, which was basically free when compared at how much something like VMS or z/OS would cost in licensing. When Linux came into the scene, C was already on its way out, being slowly replaced by C++ on OS/2, Windows, Mac OS, Symbian, BeOS, NewtonOS as the way to go for writing applications. The later three were even written in C++ (Newton also had NewtonScript). In 1994 we were already teaching C++ to first year CS students at my university. Proper C++, following Bjarne's ARM book, already talking about RAII and stronger type checking. It was UNIX FOSS with the assertion that portable software had to be written in C that eventually pushed C everywhere, even to the platforms that were already getting cosy with C++.
- tntn 8y agoThe price may have been symbolic for universities, but AT&T licensed Unix commercially for many tens of thousands of dollars.
- pjmlp 8y agoLearn the history of UNIX, that was almost a decade later, which was when they decided to sue BSD. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-unix-to-universities/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/16/why-att-licensed-u... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
- scruffyherder 8y agoIndeed, it was quite fun to see that in order to bootstrap Research Unix v8, you needed 4.1BSD https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/03/30/research-unix-v8/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2017/03/30/research-unix-...