By the late 80's things like the Fred Fish disks included source for a lot of the programs, many ported from Unix systems with according licenses attached.
Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.
I'm skeptical of attributing the crossover so strongly to Linus - e.g. while Aminet postdates Linux, I was used to source and sharing of source via Aminet well before I'd even heard of Linux, but before that also Fish disks and other of disks.
What is definitively true is that there was a big uptick as more people got modems and were getting exposed more to free software thinking.
Fully agree.
> Microemacs, a variation of which Linus is a known longtime user, for example, occurs in various versions on multiple Fish disks.
I knew Vim came from the Amiga community as a vi clone. But I didn't know Microemacs was originally a microcomputer Emacs clone. Thanks for your comment.
History is interesting, isn't it?
I thought it was fairly popular in the early times, at the Homebrew computer club.
I think it was more that, traditionally, universities did research using computers and personnel paid for by society. Software is a secondary outcome, so it need not bring in money.
At some time, companies entered the market that had to pay for their computer time and personnel, and wanted to make money.
Hobbyists followed suit, some of them only because buying computer hardware was extremely expensive.
If paying for software always was the norm for hobbyists, Bill Gates wouldn’t have needed to write his open letter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists)
Also, I think the merging started way earlier than Linux. For example, Jim Warren, in 1976, wrote:
”There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning "ripping off" software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it's easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won't be "stolen"”
(That was in an article about TinyBasic, the project that invented the word copyleft; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft#History)
Great historical review. Yes, it's not black-and-white, and the continuity between minicomputers and microcomputers always exist.
But IMHO, generation also plays a factor. On one hand, the Homebrew Computer Club was having its heyday in the mid-70s, on the other hand, a new generation of hackers just started to programming the Apple ][ or the C64 in the early-to-mid 80s, and many would become the later demoscener, offensive hackers, shareware writers, or famed developers. This part of history is also an essential part of the hacker culture as seen today, and it was merged into the mainstream hacking in the 90s.
For example, some jurisdictions don't have a way for authors to dedicate a work to the public domain and surrender all rights. Complications like that are why having explicit lawyer-vetted licenses are preferable, even if not all provisions of the license have been tested in court.
It makes me remember some history - the absence of free and open source mentality in the hobbyist scene. All of these examples came from commercial games, which were meant to be sold commercially, and their hostility towards crackers is completely understandable and justified. But it was not limited to commercial programs, almost nothing was open source at that time.
An interesting historical fact everyone should be aware, is that before the popularization of the World Wide Web, there was a huge gap between the academic world of minicomputers, which brought us Unix, Internet, Usenet, 4.3 BSD, MIT-style hacking culture, free software movement; and the hobbyist world of microcomputers, which brought us CP/M, C64, BASIC, IBM PC, Amiga, BBS, Fidonet, Phreak/Whole Earth-style hacking culture (and some cracking), were essentially two completely different worlds in parallel. The division was largely caused by the fact that the formal world was inaccessible to ordinary people without special status.
The most striking thing was the absence of free and open source mentality in the hobbyist scene. There was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire world of BBS, and lots of helpful microcomputer communities, lot of system and development utilities, but almost nothing was open source. Many authors saw their programs as the work of personal dedication or an art, and believed no one but the author should be allowed to have control over the program development. Program source was sometimes released as "source-available" and the author may encourage improvements, there were also a lot of type-in programs, but most do not explicitly grant any rights of modification and redistribution (it's very problematic, only a few programs are generously relicensed under a free license or Public Domain, and today many other programs are still available online, often with source, but no 3rd-party hobbyist development at any scale is allowed due to its copyright status, they became effectively mere personal reading materials on the stone, and even as reading materials, the information you obtained by reading them is still somewhat toxic. And I heard the holding company of C64 KERNAL refuses to license the code to most community replica projects...). The community worked mainly by Golden Rule - in fact you can do many things based on those programs and code without authorization and licenses, as long as the original author is not offended, but almost nothing could be taken for granted! In today's world of GitHub, it was a virtually unimaginable time.
There were exceptions, and there were usually written by microcomputing enthusiasts with an academic background, e.g. Li-Chen Wang's Tiny BASIC had a copyright notice of "Copyleft, all wrongs reserved"; Ward Christensen's XModem was explicitly released to the public domain, and it became one of the most frequently-modified program in the entire history of microcomputer, and ultimately evolved into ZModem.
However, the free and open source philosophy remained largely unpopularized in the world of microcomputers, until Linus Torvalds' released Linux, an kernel written for a 386, under GPL, and when dial-up Internet access became more common. Only then, the city of hobbyists and the city of the academic became one, and the two strands of hacking culture fully merged.