18 Feb
2020
18 Feb
'20
3:48 p.m.
The term OSS to mean free as in beer is just not correct. The sources
were always free a as in available to be read but just like today they are
licensed.
Ad for Universities. The point is if you had a vax you had troff as a
miniimun an $50 for ditroff was not a hardship.
If you had a binary workstation from DEC or Sun you got troff on the system
and if you got a masscomp you got ditroff.
The point is people had access to a working binary without spending any we
real extra money - which was Jons point.
The ecosystem under Unix was fine until the real a FOSS world which was
when groff appears.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 10:28 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
--
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual
ditroff was always >>open source<<
and any licensee could get it and see
it. The problem you are suggesting is that it was not >>free<< i.e.
FOSS.
I don't like your use of "open source"; it is way out of skew with
how it's used today.
AT&T licensed it with a small set of fees.
IIRC $1K for the first CPU,
an
$50 for each and redistribution license was $10K
and $5/system.
That was very painful for universities and/or small businesses. Sure
Sun and Masscomp could afford that. Your average computing center /
computer science department / startup would have to think twice or thrice.
Per CPU licensing was particularly painful if you had a bunch
of workstations.
Arnold