3 ms·

BSD was encumbered by AT&T code & licenses and most definitely not open source until something like 1992 and BSD4.4-Lite (which really begat the open source *BS

• hollerith 13y ago
  Yes, and that does not contradict anything I wrote. Particularly, the BSD license long predates 1992, and Sun Microsystems took advantage of that license to sell computers in which BSD constituted a large fraction of the software starting in 1982. The fact that there was a decade or more of legal uncertainty over whether AT&T could use the courts to stop the distribution of BSD by the University of California certainly had an inhibitory effect, but never actually stopped the distribution of BSD by the University, and did not prevent BSD's source code from being redistributed freely or from being incorporated into most operating systems capable of connecting to the internet even before the legal uncertainty was resolved in the early 1990s.
  • kjs3 13y ago
    That's not how what you wrote read. You may have meant that a BSD license existed in '82, but you implied the BSD modified Unix operating system was generally open source long before it really was. The fact that many manufactures secured separate licenses (for which they paid Berkeley a lot of money) is irrelevant. The simple fact is that the truly "free" BSDs did not exist before the early 90s and the resolution of the dispute between AT&T and Berkeley. Full stop. End of story.