The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - by Peter H. Salus

Groklaw presents chapters 2 and 3 of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, a History of Free and Open Source, by Dr. Peter H. Salus. "In spring 1969, AT&T decided to terminate its involvement in a project called Multics -- Multiplexed Information and Computing Service -- which had been started in 1964 by MIT, GE and Bell Labs. This left those at AT&T Bell Labs who had been working on the project -- notably Doug McIlroy, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson -- at loose ends. Doug immediately got involved with other things in Murray Hill, NJ, but Dennis and Ken had been interested in the project per se and wanted to explore several of its ideas."

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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - by Peter H. Salus - Ch. 2 & 3 (Groklaw)

Posted Apr 15, 2005 16:54 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Speaking as an old-timer (who first used Unix in 1980 and the Arpanet before that), this is a terrific series.

Something Salus hasn't really made clear yet is the shaky status of copyright as applied to computer software in those days; it wasn't clear that a computer program could even be copyrighted. The only mechanism AT&T had to enforce its "IP rights" was contract; you had to sign the contract before you got the tape. Also, the US didn't ratify the Berne Convention until 1989; before that, if you didn't put "Copyright ..." or c-in-a-circle on your work or register with the Copyright Office, and you then distributed your work widely, it was public domain. Because of this, in the early 80s it was considered kind of hostile to put a copyright notice on a computer program, unless immediately followed by very permissive language.

A typical notice that you'd see on Usenet in those days was something like "Do anything you want with this as long as you don't make money off of it or pretend you wrote it." The "don't make money" part would violate today's concept of FLOSS, but the spirit was the same.