OT: 'conduct unbecoming of a hacker'

Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Feb 10 12:01:12 PST 2016


On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 19:44:50 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Perhaps historically as a guinea pig, but its use is waning for 
> more permissive licenses, which have been around for decades 
> too.

Well, they had been around for things like X11, which had a 
commercial consortium driving the development. X11 was just a 
reference implementation, and members got early access to it so 
that they could implement it in their proprietary X11 terminals 
before the general public got access to it...

But as (even public) universities were pressured to earn money 
from their research the heads higher up insisted on 
anti-commercial licensing. Only when GPL gained traction could 
the comp. sci. people start to push for something more liberal.

IIRC the most standard licensing was educational-use, 
non-commercial-use or public domain back then. People had to pay 
for their compilers and IDEs too... quite a lot... And phone 
bills from using BBSes. Shareware was a much more accepted 
concept at that point in time too... GPL changed the world quite 
significantly.





More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list