I'm Brett Slatkin and this is where I write about programming and related topics. You can contact me here or view my projects.

03 December 2011

Shortest explanation I've seen of why we're here today:

"This put AT&T in a bind. In 1956, AT&T had agreed to a U.S government consent decree that prevented the company from selling products not directly related to telephones and telecommunications, in return for its legal monopoly status in running the country's long-distance phone service. So Unix could not be sold as a product. Instead, AT&T released the Unix source code under license to anyone who asked, charging only a nominal fee. The critical wrinkle here was that the consent decree prevented AT&T from supporting Unix. Indeed, for many years Bell Labs researchers proudly displayed their Unix policy at conferences with a slide that read, "No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance."

With no other channels of support available to them, early Unix adopters banded together for mutual assistance, forming a loose network of user groups all over the world. They had the source code, which helped. And they didn't view Unix as a standard software product, because nobody seemed to be looking after it. So these early Unix users themselves set about fixing bugs, writing new tools, and generally improving the system as they saw fit."

From The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
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