4 ms·

>Unix source code was given away (or cheaply licensed) Yeah that's not true, at the beginning it was ~10k per processor. But you can thank Berkeley for rewriti

by nix23 4y ago

>Unix source code was given away (or cheaply licensed) Yeah that's not true, at the beginning it was ~10k per processor. But you can thank Berkeley for rewriting Unix and replace all the AT&T parts. And yes SunOS was from the BSD lineage. https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Unix-cost-during-the-70s-or-80s https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Unix-cost-during-the-70s-...

monocasa 4y ago
It was free up through and including V7. Because of the specifics of AT&T's monopoly on the phone system, they were banned from commercializing other technologies. It was only starting with System III and 32V that they were able to charge for it since their monopoly was taken away and they were broken up into the 'baby bells'.
- nix23 4y ago
  >It was free up through and including V7 They could not sell a product but the licenses.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    They could not sell licenses. Hell, it wasn't even clear that software had copyright protections at all anyway, with computer programs being added to us code as explicitly copyrightable in the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980. They charged their tape copying fee that was a couple hundred dollars or so, but that's the kind of thing even the GPL explicitly says is OK for distribution. They would later charge a license fee for even the older versions, but they didn't originally. > In the early 1970s AT&T distributed early versions of Unix at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software in the modern meaning of the phrase. After Unix became more widespread in the early 1980s, AT&T stopped the free distribution and charged for system patches. As it is quite difficult to switch to another architecture, most researchers paid for a commercial license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
    - nix23 4y ago
      >at no cost to government and academic researchers, I really don't know why you try to change history, your own Wikipedia sentence says that it was just free for gov and edu.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        They didn't distribute it to anyone other than edu and gov researchers at that point. This isn't changing history; they were forbidden from selling anything other than phone service.
teddyh 4y ago
> at the beginning it was ~10k per processor. Was Unix popular at that time?
- nix23 4y ago
  Well maybe not as much as VMS but it started to gain traction.
- simne 4y ago
  That was golden time for developers. Their public status was like movie stars. And for West it was normal price, because even considering wide usage of also cheap CP/M, on some level of organization size, was unavoidable to switch to Unixes or to mainframe - CP/M just was too limited, was not capable to handle big business load. When BSD first appear, Unix machines also where too small and slow for big business, but very soon appear client-server architecture, and later clouds (Beowulf, I think, oldest wide used private cloud soft), Unixes become unlimited.

by nix23 4y ago

monocasa 4y ago

It was free up through and including V7. Because of the specifics of AT&T's monopoly on the phone system, they were banned from commercializing other technologies. It was only starting with System III and 32V that they were able to charge for it since their monopoly was taken away and they were broken up into the 'baby bells'.

nix23 4y ago
>It was free up through and including V7 They could not sell a product but the licenses.
- monocasa 4y ago
  They could not sell licenses. Hell, it wasn't even clear that software had copyright protections at all anyway, with computer programs being added to us code as explicitly copyrightable in the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980. They charged their tape copying fee that was a couple hundred dollars or so, but that's the kind of thing even the GPL explicitly says is OK for distribution. They would later charge a license fee for even the older versions, but they didn't originally. > In the early 1970s AT&T distributed early versions of Unix at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software in the modern meaning of the phrase. After Unix became more widespread in the early 1980s, AT&T stopped the free distribution and charged for system patches. As it is quite difficult to switch to another architecture, most researchers paid for a commercial license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...
  - nix23 4y ago
    >at no cost to government and academic researchers, I really don't know why you try to change history, your own Wikipedia sentence says that it was just free for gov and edu.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      They didn't distribute it to anyone other than edu and gov researchers at that point. This isn't changing history; they were forbidden from selling anything other than phone service.

teddyh 4y ago

> at the beginning it was ~10k per processor. Was Unix popular at that time?

nix23 4y ago
Well maybe not as much as VMS but it started to gain traction.
simne 4y ago
That was golden time for developers. Their public status was like movie stars. And for West it was normal price, because even considering wide usage of also cheap CP/M, on some level of organization size, was unavoidable to switch to Unixes or to mainframe - CP/M just was too limited, was not capable to handle big business load. When BSD first appear, Unix machines also where too small and slow for big business, but very soon appear client-server architecture, and later clouds (Beowulf, I think, oldest wide used private cloud soft), Unixes become unlimited.