On Sat, 17 Dec 2005, William Chops Westfield wrote:

> Hmm.  I wonder what has happened to 'closed source' software?  It used to
> be pretty common for computer manufacturers to offer a "source license"
> assorted universities and larger customers, thereby resulting in a steady
> influx of new features and "informed" bug fixes...
>
> I guess there's still plenty of licensable source code that is closed, but
> the availability of source for common closed applications and operating
> systems seems to be pretty much dried up (?)
>
> Perhaps the OSS movement is a reaction to this; back in the days when
> universities used mainframes, it was pretty common for each university
> to have their own hacks in the OS (and frequently their own hardware as
> well.)  As mainframes went away and were replaced by micros running
> (usually) windows, that option went away.  Till linux/etc came along.

Actually the way I see it, from analyzing what I know about the birth of 
OSS, it was caused by the revocation of the reasonable 'source access' 
license to the *nix OS codebase, at a time when several dozens of 
universities had contributed millions of lines of code in application 
and system software to the system, for more than ten years. The closure 
of the access to *nix source effectively left these universities and 
their graduate students high and dry, basically overnight (imagine 
leaving 10 years worth of mech. eng students all over the world without 
graphite for pencils by levying a heavy tax on graphite - how many 
minutes would it take them to come up with a replacement ?). The OSS 
movement was a reaction to this imho.

Peter
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