Michele Armellini ID 203828

University of Trento

Summary 2

1 Legal Protection of Software

1.1 Evolution of Computer Science
In the beginning, Computer Science was an academic discipline, counting on the contributions
of many scientists (among the most famous names we can find Pascal, Leibniz, Babbage,
Boole, von Neumann and Turing). It was an highly theoretical discipline, which acted as
a convergence of other theoretical disciplines, but that could produce very concrete things.
From the mid-nineteenth century, Computer Science slowly started to become part of the
industry.

1.2 The Computer Industry and the birth of Unix

In 1952 the first computer was sold by IBM. It was very expensive and really big but marked
an important step for the later developments. Only three years later, the SHARE group was
formed for the IBM 701 Data Processing System. Some group members were also competitors,
but collaborated in the group. In the following years, the FORTRAN and the Cobol program-
ming language were born (respectively in 1957 and 1959). The 60s saw the birth of the first
operating system, the FORTRAN Monitor System, of Multiprogramming and Time-sharing.
Software in these years was still shared as academic papers, for example the first LISP inter-
preter was written on paper with no copyright protection. Between 1969 and 1973 at the Bell
laboratories (owned by AT&T) the Unix operating system was developed. It was published
in a publication titled ” The UNIX Time-Sharing System ” by D. M. Ritchie & K. Thomp-
son in 1974. Since a 1950 content decree between AT&T and the US Department of Justice
stated AT&T could not enter the computer and software industries to avoid a monopoly, the
Operative System was distributed ”freely” to Universities and research centers in source code
format. In 1979, with Unix version 7, AT&T adopts a new license that prohibits the use of
the unix source code as teaching material (after a teacher wrote a complete commentary of
it). After this, the teacher of the University of Amsterdam, Tanenbaum, writes MINIX as a
teaching tool, without using any of the AT&T code. In 1982 AT&T lost the monopoly over
the telephone services, this caused the creation of the Unix System Laboratories and the era
of commercial Unix

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Michele Armellini ID 203828

2 Free Software
2.1 GNU and Linux
Richard Stallman was a worker at MIT AI Lab, where Xerox donated a new printer. Before
the donation he developed a software to noify all workers of the office when the printer stopped
working. The source code of the driver of the new printer was not available so the software
was not working anymore. Stallman tried to ask the guy who wrote the code to get a copy
but he declined since he signed a non-disclosure agreement with Xerox. Upset, in 1984 he
quit his job at MIT and decided to create a new Unix-like free operating system.
In 1985 he created: the Free Software Foundation, the GNU (GNU’s not Unix) and GNU
Emacs.
In 1989 Stallman created the GNU General Public License (GPL). As he said, ”When
speaking about free software, we refer to freedom, not price. With GNU GPL you can give
away or sell copies of free software receive copies of source code or can get it if asking change
the software or using pieces of it know you can do the things above.”
He was able to use the copyright law in a sophisticated manner, creating copyleft. Copyleft
is ”copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a mean
of privatizing software, it becomes a mean of keeping software free. The central idea of copyleft
is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy, modify, and distribute modified
versions - but not permission to add other restriction of their own.”
Some years later the lGPL (or lesser GPL/ Library GPL) was created ad hoc for the use
with libraries. It allowed the use of the library without the need for the final work to use the
same license as it was with the GPL.
In 1991 Emacs, GCC and system libraries and utilities were created. The only thing missing
was a kernel for the GNU operating system. In october of that same year Linus Torvalds
released Linux. From version 0.12 Linux is covered by the GNU GPL.
GNU and Linux toghether made a complete free operating system. Distributions, collections
of components and simplified installation processes, started to appear.

2.2 BSD
The University of California at Berkeley in the 70’s was deeply involved in the development
of Unix technologies. In 1978 Bill Joy created the first Berkeley Software Distribution, which
consisted in a text editor (Vi) and a PASCAL compiler. The distribution was made available
with a regular AT&T Unix License. In 1979 DARPA asked Berkeley to develop the TCP/IP
stack for the Unix OS so that the Internet could be used. It was released in 1983 combined
with BSD 4.2 which still required an AT&T license. In 1989 the TCP/IP stack was released
alone as free software with BSD Network Release 1, so that people wouldn’t need an AT&T
license. In 1991 BSD Network Release 2 was released. It was a complete Unix-like OS with
no AT&T code except from 6 files which were completely removed just one year later. Many
developers started working on their version of BSD, such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD Berkeley
Software Distribution starts in 1992 to sell commercial version of BSD code as the ’UNIX
operating system’ and for this reason it was sued by AT&T for copyright infringment and
trademark related issues.
AT&T sold the copyright for Unix to Novel which, in 1994, reaches an out of court agreement
with BSD. The BSD OS could then become free software.
After this two different families of licenses were born:
• copyright licenses
• copyleft licenses