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Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by nirvana on Thursday October 27, 2011 @03:30PM (#3165075)
Not at the time, but it is now. It was owned by the Regents of The University of California, and in the intervening decades, it has gone from being a license you had to pay for, or otherwise negotiate, to a generally open source license.
Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by protomyth on Thursday October 27, 2011 @04:03PM (#3165234)
Wikipedia puts the BSD (open source) at 1988 introduction with the GPL being 1989. NeXTSTEP was released September 18, 1989. So, I would say your dates do not mesh and joejohnson's comment is correct.
Re:Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction by flomo on Friday October 28, 2011 @12:48AM (#3167039)
BSD wasn't completely open source until much later, so I would assume that NeXT purchased a license, just as they did for Display PostScript and other pieces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi