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Source available.Source available.Posted Feb 23, 2007 19:11 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (guest, #15888)Parent article: How an Accident of Hardware Design Encouraged Open Source (O'ReillyNet)
Another point, going back to the mainframe and PDP-11 era, is that most software was distributed as source or at least "source available". Mainframes especially might feature 3rd party add-ons and configuration differences that would require apps to be compiled on the hardware they'd run on.
The first "open source" program I ever encountered was a "star trek" game (great grandaddy of nettrek, perhaps), written in Algol for the Burroughs B6700 and similar. It had changed hands (university computer centers, mostly) several times before I saw it, this was circa 1975.
Even into the early '80s I was supporting commercial mainframe packages that were distributed with source to allow local customization. Not truly open source perhaps, but (IMHO) it was a reaction to the _closing_ of that by Microsoft and others that helped stimulate the Open Source movemnt.
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Source available. Posted Feb 26, 2007 18:43 UTC (Mon) by MBR (guest, #43632) [Link] Very specifically, what helped stimulate the Free Software movement (which was rebranded the "Open Source" movement in the late 1990s) was Richard Stallman's frustration with the way corporations were trying to lock up everything in sight. In the late 1970s, he used to rant to me and anyone else who'd listen, about how "they're taking away our freedom to program." According to "Free as in Freedom," Sam Williams' biography of Stallman, one of the major culprits was Xerox. Unlike most of us programmers who were frustrated with how corporations were making it impossible for us to share our code, Stallman had the realization that he could stop this by distributing useful code under a license that required recipients of the code to behave the way programmers had been used to behaving throughout the 1970s.
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