4 ms·

> EMACS is a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it. That surprised me too.

jillesvangurp 6y ago
OSS was not a widespread thing until much later, around the time of the early web and Linux. People were sharing code of course but trying to monetize development tools was perfectly reasonable at the time. Licensing was in general messy and not very formalized (hence the existence of several BSD forks). There were may versions of unix, several of which were proprietary and built by various hardware companies (like Sun's Solaris). Unix on PCs was even less of a thing at the time as PCs were still pretty limited. The 80386 with 32 bit instructions was only introduced in 1985. I'm not sure there ever was a unix version capable of running on 16 bit intel CPUs before that. So people programming for and using Unix hardware were mainly doing that professionally or in an academic setting and not on some home computer (as they were referred to once upon a time). So, companies donating OSS software was not a big thing. Bill Joy of course worked on BSD kernels and distributions and would have technically been one of the early OSS developers. So, open sourcing vi was probably a natural thing for him when he created it in 1976 and released it along with the first version of BSD while at Berkeley. So, he was an academic at the time and not selling software for profit yet.
- rjsw 6y ago
  BSD wasn't open source back then, you needed to have an AT&T source code licence as well.
  - mprovost 6y ago
    Right, if you look at the early BSD sources [0] it's not a complete OS - there's no kernel. It's just a bunch of utilities that you were supposed to install on an already running AT&T system. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-S...
  - mpol 6y ago
    Also, ed wasn't open source. Vi still used ed, so even of vi itself was open source, it wasn't completely functional. It was only around 2001 / 2003 when Caldera open sourced some UNIX utilities under an open source license as part of the Heirloom project. Parts of that were ed and mailx.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

OSS was not a widespread thing until much later, around the time of the early web and Linux. People were sharing code of course but trying to monetize development tools was perfectly reasonable at the time. Licensing was in general messy and not very formalized (hence the existence of several BSD forks). There were may versions of unix, several of which were proprietary and built by various hardware companies (like Sun's Solaris). Unix on PCs was even less of a thing at the time as PCs were still pretty limited. The 80386 with 32 bit instructions was only introduced in 1985. I'm not sure there ever was a unix version capable of running on 16 bit intel CPUs before that. So people programming for and using Unix hardware were mainly doing that professionally or in an academic setting and not on some home computer (as they were referred to once upon a time). So, companies donating OSS software was not a big thing. Bill Joy of course worked on BSD kernels and distributions and would have technically been one of the early OSS developers. So, open sourcing vi was probably a natural thing for him when he created it in 1976 and released it along with the first version of BSD while at Berkeley. So, he was an academic at the time and not selling software for profit yet.

rjsw 6y ago
BSD wasn't open source back then, you needed to have an AT&T source code licence as well.
- mprovost 6y ago
  Right, if you look at the early BSD sources [0] it's not a complete OS - there's no kernel. It's just a bunch of utilities that you were supposed to install on an already running AT&T system. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-S...
- mpol 6y ago
  Also, ed wasn't open source. Vi still used ed, so even of vi itself was open source, it wasn't completely functional. It was only around 2001 / 2003 when Caldera open sourced some UNIX utilities under an open source license as part of the Heirloom project. Parts of that were ed and mailx.