RE: Government purchases should require open source, not just POSIX.

["David E. Y. Sarna" <David@ObjectSoftCorp.com>]

Having been around in the old days, I can testify  that IBM did make
source available on request, on the theory that since the software only
ran on IBM mainframes (there were no compatibles) it wasn't useful on
competitors' boxes, which had a very different instruction set. In those
days hardware included the right for unlimited software; at most the
customer paid a shipping charge.  It was only gradually, at the end of
the 1960s that IBM recognized that software was a separate source of
revenue, and as IBM did so did others, creating "packages" or the
software industry as we now know it.

Regards,
David E. Y. Sarna	david@objectsoftcorp.com
ObjectSoft Corp. (NASDAQ: OSFT)
433 Hackensack Ave., Hackensack, NJ 07601 	
201 343-9100 (voice) 	201 343-0056 (Fax)

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	James Love [SMTP:love@cptech.org]
> Sent:	Monday, May 04, 1998 6:49 AM
> To:	Multiple recipients of list AM-INFO
> Subject:	Re: Government purchases should require open source, not
> just POSIX.
> 
> bSomeone  told me that in the olden days, IBM shipped the source code
> for
> software, which was compiled on the machine.   
> 
>     Jamie
> 
> -- 
> James Love
> Consumer Project on Technology