HISTORY OF SOFTWARE

Software communities that can now be compared with today's free software community existed for a long time before the free software movement and its term "free software".[1] According to Richard Stallman, the software sharing community at MIT existed for "many years" before he got involved in 1971.[2]

Other examples were large user groups such as that of the IBM 701, whose user group was called SHARE, and that of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), whose user group was called DECUS.

Software was produced largely by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration and was not itself seen as a commodity. Operating systems, such as early versions of UNIX, were widely distributed and maintained by the community of users. Source code, the human-readable version of software, was distributed with software because users frequently modified the software themselves to fix bugs or add new functionality, and because programmers couldn't possibly create executable machine-code for the wide variety of hardware that existed. Thus in this era, software was free in a sense, not because of any concerted effort by software users or developers, but rather because software was developed by the user community.

AT&T distributed early versions of UNIX at no cost to government and academic researchers, but these versions did not come with permission to redistribute or to distribute modified versions, and were thus not free software as the term has come to mean.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, companies began routinely imposing restrictions on programmers through copyright. Sometimes this was because they saw a way to make money by blocking rights and selling them back. AT&T, for example, began to enforce its restrictive licences when the company decided it might profit by selling the Unix system.[citation needed] Bill Gates signaled the change of the times in 1976 when he wrote his now-famous Open Letter to Hobbyists, sending out the message that what hackers called "sharing" was, in his words, "stealing".

The advent of Usenet in the early 1980s further connected the programming community and provided a simpler way for programmers to share their software and contribute to software others had written.[3]

Some free software which was developed before 1983 and continued to be used for a long time afterward includes TeX and SPICE.