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A comment on Interview with Bill Joy (1984). Parent comment

Re:Interview with Bill Joy (1984) by rjsw on Friday February 12, 2021 @08:12AM (#26113238)
BSD wasn't open source back then, you needed to have an AT&T source code licence as well.
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Re:Interview with Bill Joy (1984) by mpol on Friday February 12, 2021 @11:32AM (#26115403)
Also, ed wasn't open source. Vi still used ed, so even of vi itself was open source, it wasn't completely functional.

It was only around 2001 / 2003 when Caldera open sourced some UNIX utilities under an open source license as part of the Heirloom project. Parts of that were ed and mailx.

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Re:Interview with Bill Joy (1984) by mprovost on Friday February 12, 2021 @08:35AM (#26113449)
Right, if you look at the early BSD sources [0] it's not a complete OS - there's no kernel. It's just a bunch of utilities that you were supposed to install on an already running AT&T system.

[0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/tree/BSD-1-S...

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