Historically, a lot of systems software was given away. Operating System source code. Text formatting systems. The annual issuance of the DECUS tape, covering p

Historically, a lot of systems software was given away. Operating System source code. Text formatting systems. The annual issuance of the DECUS tape, covering pdp11 and Vax and Tops-10 systems is where I intersected with this. And of course, this in turn fed into other trends. People shared code routinely because they had always shared code routinely. The emergence of expensive code, could be held to be an anomoly: Most code of the day outside of commerce and military and secret places was written in publicly funded institutions, and shared as a matter of course, or at worst sold for cost-recovery prices. This also relates to the emergence of "hold harmless" licencing terms. If you give something away, you want to be sure nobody comes back at you for redress. Stallman's GNU Manifesto was a reaction to change in this landscape. It wasn't "hey, lets break the dam wall of sold software by inventing free software" it was "this modern trend to locking software up is wrong. I want to return to the roots of free software, which has always existed"