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Old 23rd March 2014
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by censored View Post
I remember the eighties, and I rarely found any source accompanying a program in the PC world, at least when dealing with commercial software. Non-commercial software was only slightly better in that regard. The Unix situation was a little easier. Not much tho... just about anything related to SCO was $$$, regardless of the source availability, which usually couldn't be redistributed.
There were many a night back in the mid- to late-1980's where I spent countless hours late at night poking about the major (& public...) FTP sites hosting all kinds of software -- much in the public domain. Sometimes source accompanied the file archive(s); sometimes it did not.

Two which come to mind were the White Sands Missle Range Simtel archive along with wuarchive.wustl.edu. As I vaguely recall, the directory structure & organization of applications by type was somewhat similar across all sites, but each had other unique offerings which made it worth the time to poke about each of them.

All of the authors found that their work was useful in some manner, & decided for some reason(s) that they wanted to make their efforts freely available out of altruism, disinterest, and/or an inability to offer sustainable support. It could be that their employers were open to release, but did not want to take on any kind of liability, hence the release into the public domain. Here it is, we wrote it, but we relinquish any associated liability because we have other things to do.

No, this didn't fully fit the view seen through Stallman's lens (who didn't voice his views until much later...), but that's okay. Free software has been available in a broader context for a very long time. It is not a recent creation.
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