Re: Without open-source, there'd be no BSD, and without BSD
The BSD TCP stack wasn't open source, it was the licensing was too hard so control of it was ignored. DARPA paid for the BSD stack and a fair amount of the BSD project and since the US gov doesn't have the concept of a Crown Copyright, the software was free to use by others. You still needed a AT&T Unix (TM) license to use it but those were free for Universities but a small company would need to fork out over $80,000 for a source license to use the BSD TCP stack on their Vax. There were other TCP network stacks and some of them fixed some of the issues that are still causing problems with BSD influenced stacks today. STREAMS and Plan9 are just a few years younger that the BSD stack while Solaris still uses STREAMS today.
OpenSSL started out as SSLeay and the early versions of that could be used as a drop in for a very expensive RSA library which is kind of odd since the later RSA SSL-C was based on and written by the guys who started SSLeay.
I remember going through the licensing paperwork when we were running the CERN http and NCSA web server but we had DARPA taking care of most of that and covering the bills.
There were others like the ISODE ISO stack, email and general X400/X500 mess that sometimes were public domain and sometimes very expensive to maintain at the same time. I seem to remember that our support for CDC's version of ISODE was only about $50k a year in 1992.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
