The term OSS to mean free as in beer is just not correct.   The sources
were always free a as in available to be read but just like today they are
licensed.

Ad for Universities. The point is if you had a vax you had troff as a
miniimun an $50 for ditroff was not a hardship.

If you had a binary workstation from DEC or Sun you got troff on the system
and if you got a masscomp you got ditroff.

The point is people had access to a working binary without spending any we
real extra money - which was Jons point.

The ecosystem under Unix was fine until the real a FOSS world which was
when groff appears.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 10:28 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > ditroff was always >>open source<< and any licensee could get it and see
> > it.  The problem you are suggesting is that it was not >>free<< i.e.
> FOSS.
>
> I don't like your use of "open source"; it is way out of skew with
> how it's used today.
>
> > AT&T licensed it with a small set of fees.   IIRC $1K for the first CPU,
> an
> > $50 for each and redistribution license was $10K and $5/system.
>
> That was very painful for universities and/or small businesses. Sure
> Sun and Masscomp could afford that. Your average computing center /
> computer science department / startup would have to think twice or thrice.
>
> Per CPU licensing was particularly painful if you had a bunch
> of workstations.
>
> Arnold
>
-- 
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual