[crackmonkey] Nick's ideas taking hold

[Seth David Schoen]

Sounds just like what Nick discussed a few days ealier:

http://opensource.oreilly.com/news/scoville_0399.html

   But there's another problem: Stallman wasn't the first.
   
   Years before he or Eric Raymond ever hit on the idea of liberating
   source code, the UNIX operating system was being developed at AT&T
   Bell Laboratories. As a government-regulated monopoly, AT&T was barred
   from competition in the computer industry. Though UNIX source code was
   not then "free" in either the FSF or OSI sense, it could be licensed
   at nominal cost.
   
   Universities were among the first to take advantage. As a result, UNIX
   ended up in the hands of hundreds of collaborating academic
   programmers. In particular, the UNIX effort at the University of
   California at Berkeley spawned a West Coast hacker culture to rival
   Stallman's MIT cohort. Ultimately, the student programmers at Berkeley
   created their own variation of the operating system so potent that it
   became a major fork in the UNIX lineage -- the Berkeley Software
   Distribution, or BSD.
   
   It is difficult to overestimate the role of BSD UNIX in modern
   computing. Not only did it beget many key features of all future
   versions of UNIX, but it was also under the BSD flag that UNIX met the
   Internet (though at the time it went by its more ancient name,
   Arpanet). Much of the most common system software surrounding the
   TCP/IP protocol was developed at UC Berkeley, and was introduced to
   the world as part of BSD.
   
   In the years since, BSD has enjoyed not only a substantial commercial
   run, but has also found its way into a commerce-free distribution of
   its own, one to rival Linux. Though not as popular or mediagenic as
   Linux, FreeBSD can nevertheless be widely found on the machines of
   hobbyists, ISPs, and major corporations alike.
   
   So the shared source collaboration concept had received significant
   validation long before Raymond or Stallman showed up on the field.
   That would make AT&T the unlikely mother of the movement, having
   quietly accomplished the feat with neither Stallman's righteous
   rhetoric nor Raymond's theoretical grandstanding.

-- 
              Seth David Schoen / schoen at uclink4.berkeley.edu
He said, "This is what the king who will reign over you will do."  And they
said, "Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the
nations." (1 Sam 8)  http://ishmael.geecs.org/~sigma/   http://www.loyalty.org/
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