On Dec 19, 2005, at 11:05 PM, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> There was no PD software as we
> know it know at the moment Stallman created the GPL.
>
Sure there was; though not all of it was intentional. Part of the
reaction to unix disappearing was that Berkeley slapped copyright
notices on everything (remember, this was back in the days where
you actually had to explicitly copyright things.)  It created a lot
of flack when things like /bin/true (which I think was a shell script
at the time) suddenly being claimed to be "owned" by Berkeley...

I have software I wrote in that timeframe that I didn't copyright,
released publicly, and consider to have been released to the public
domain.  Occasionally something showed up in someone else's commercial
product (an odd feeling.)  More often some small subset of the computing
community got some small benefit from being able to modify and/or run
my software, which was the intent...

BillW
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