Why Would Fedora be Free ? Can it be Trusted?
Jeremy Brown
jeremy at cadre5.com
Thu May 13 17:31:27 UTC 2004
Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
> While your explanation of the birth of GNU/Linux is excellent, the
> above paragraphs are a crock. As far as I know and recall, only a very
> small part of the software market "used to have" those four freedoms.
> None of the early Unix variants that I recall were either Free
> (capitalized to mean open-source and with those freedoms) or free
> (with a price of zero).
I may be incorrect on my UNIX history, but my understanding was that
during the early Bell labs years (especially before the explosion of
personal computers) UNIX source was distributed with almost no regard
for software licensing, and for "free" monetarily as well--or at most
around the cost of media. Even after UNIX was copyrighted, relatively
"free" implementations like BSD and Minix still existed.
Jeremy
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