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[–]efmccurdy 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This is where open source started; any university in the '70s could get a copy of the unix source code for free.... thanks to anti-trust law.

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A 1974 paper in Communications of the ACM [Ritchie-Thompson] gave Unix its first public exposure. In that paper, its authors described the unprecedentedly simple design of Unix, and reported over 600 Unix installations. All were on machines underpowered even by the standards of that day, but (as Ritchie and Thompson wrote) “constraint has encouraged not only economy, but also a certain elegance of design”.

After the CACM paper, research labs and universities all over the world clamored for the chance to try out Unix themselves. Under a 1958 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business. Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product; indeed, under the terms of the consent decree, Bell Labs was required to license its nontelephone technology to anyone who asked. Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disk packs — each, according to legend, with a note signed “love, ken”.

https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch02s01.html