4 ms·

>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.