@mage_of_dragons @redstarfish Originally Dennis did send out tapes of the Unix sources to Universities just to be nice and that was free software.

Later A&AT decided that Unix would be kept proprietary (with the sources only provided if you signed an NDA agreeing to betray humanity by not sharing) and then later with the stroke of a pen in a court, software was deemed to fall under copyright and all software was automatically rendered proprietary by default.

Those Universities accepted the Unix sources and improved them and made them into their own OS distributions under proprietary terms - it was primarily GNU developers who managed to convince such Universities to use a free license instead of a proprietary one (alas the OS's released under a free license were still proprietary, as they still included many proprietary programs and unlicensed files).


As always, this holy knowledge has been denied to mage thanks to fediblock.