“Before there was an Open Source Initiative, before the Free
Software Foundation was even a twinkle in St. iGNUcius’ eye, Unix
hackers were fighting lawyers and commercial interests for the
right to copy and distribute source code. The fight began, in
part, due to the beliefs of an avuncular Australian professor named
John Lions, who thought that by making source code available and
using it as a teaching tool, he could encourage the highest
possible standards in programming.”
“Even when they were first published, Lions’ books were
technically only available to licensees of sixth edition Unix. The
operating system’s new owner, Western Electric, didn’t want just
anyone learning the inner workings of the Unix kernel.”
“By the time the seventh edition system came out, the company
had begun to worry more about the intellectual property issues and
‘trade secrets’ and so forth,” Ritchie explains.”
“The seventh and subsequent licenses explicitly prohibited the
kind of teaching that Lions had been doing.”