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rights-restrictions-licensing-history.md

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Rights, restrictions, and licensing: History

An attempt to put the history of FOSS in the context of the broader sweep of history.

through 15th century:

Moveable type printing press

church and state monopoly served censorship

Stationer's Guild in UK had monopoly. Expired.

through the 18th Century

Statute of Anne was first copyright law. UK. 1710

US revolution, Constitution.

Article I, Section 8, clause 8 gives Congress power to create copyright, patents.

A great many foundational ideas for computing were worked, out, just for some examples by no means exhaustive:

Boole

De Morgan

Jacquard,

Babbage,

Lovelace,

Hollerith and the 1890 census

German mathematician David Hilbert (1900) at the turn of the century set the stage for Church-Turing.

Into the 20th century

Copyright grew to encompass new things:

player piano rolls, sheet music, recorded sound, photographs, moving pictures

1930s

pre WWII

Church, Turing, Shannon et al,

The roots of an explicit information theory and computer science were pretty much laid down prior to WWII, with a long tail back into the history of mathematics.

1940s

WWII:

Military need drove developments in cryptology, cryptography, cryptanalysis, logistics, ballistics, eg, Manhattan project, Bletchley Park Bombe and Colossus.

The Manhattan project was a notable user of services by people referred to as computers.

ENIAC

1950s

post WWII

EDVAC & von Neumanns at IAS, rise of electronic, stored-instruction, digital computing

printers and computers used to be people

AT&T monopoly, consent decree restricting it from computing business

late 1960s

Multics --> Spacewar+PDB --> C+Unix --> Berkeley

1970s

Honeywell vs. Sperry-Univac case breaks fundamental computing patents.

deregulatory spirit, eg

  • airlines
  • homebrewing

Forgot to mention 1970s birth (MITS ALTAIR, MS BASIC) and rise (IBM, Apple, TRS-80, TI-99/A, Timex/Sinclair, etc) of the personal computer using integrated circuit microprocessors.

1980s

  • copyright comes to software,
  • university tech transfer offices (Dole-Bayh Act)
    • business formed from University efforts, NDAs
  • break-up of original AT&T: It could sell Unix licenses
  • IBM PC
  • Macintosh

Told story of Stallman and the printer jam alert system vs. the driver under NDA.

Companies cannibalized the MIT AI lab: Symbolics, Lisp Machines

Foundation of the GNU project, then the FSF, that takes us to 1985.

Goal was a complete, free OS. One huge success was gcc (cf Tanenbaum and the Free University Compiler Kit, Cygnus). Made many applications and utilities, never quite got their kernel, The Hurd, to work well enough fast enough to be so widely adopted as other kernels.

At RIT: Checkout out the CAST building's McGraw displays (MCI); Wallace 2nd floor, printing presses.

Unix --> BSDs (Free, Open, Net, Dragonfly, MacOS via NeXT) (free and open source before those terms were coined for software)

BSDi, 386BSD

Jolitzes, Bill Joy

Proprietary Unix versions: SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, Ultrix, Xenix

1990s

1991 Torvalds, U. Helsinki grad student, PC, MINIX & Tannenbaum, dial-up timeshare mainframe.

Puts it on Usenet (store-and-forward, "news", groups, subscribe, tracked what was read) and FTP (pre HTTP file transfer, see also gopher)

Linux kernel + GNU utilities --> a useful system

grew alongside the BSDs

Tim Berners-Lee @ CERN, WWW, http, browsers

Marc Andreessen @ NCSA UIUC, Mosaic, <img> tag

what is Mozilla short for?

Netscape

Microsoft IE and bundling

browser wars

antitrust suit

Sun, Oracle et al

StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, The Document Foundation

Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act

Rise of home dial-up

AOL

2000s

9/11

Afghanistan, Iraq, DHS, Room 641A

2008 financial crash

flash crash

OLPC 2005

XO-1 at scale, 2007

rapid rise of cell phone use, SMS

XHR 1999-2006

Google web apps, Gmail 2004-2009, Google Maps, etc

eg, cloud+mobile

Firefox, Chrome

start of Facebook, Twitter, et al

Android 2008 iPhone 2007

2010s

rapid rise of smartphone use

Snowden revelations 2013

VW scandal 2015

social media use rises to near-ubiquity

2016 election and use of social media

media chaos: advertising flees, newspapers & other news implode filesharing: Napster & lawsuits, contributory infringement iTunes, music, audio books, video streaming