> Unix is(was?) a commercial product Unix was originally a non-commercial product, albeit produced by paid researchers at Bell Labs (owned by a commercial enti

> Unix is(was?) a commercial product Unix was originally a non-commercial product, albeit produced by paid researchers at Bell Labs (owned by a commercial entity, AT&T). And actually, Wikipedia claims that {Thompson, Ritchie, et al} received no financial support for the first version, which was developed on a spare PDP-7, so I'm not even clear if they were using paid time to work on it. It was non-commercial because AT&T had been forbidden by a 1956 consent decree to be commercially active in the fledgling computer space. It was only in 1983 (with the breakup of AT&T and the consequent expiry of the consent decree) that commercialization of Unix started, over 15 years after its creation. So the successes of Unix pre-1983 should be lumped with the successes of GNU (founded that same year) and Linux, as being non-commercial and not-for-profit.