Yea, if you look at the license statements from the 80s and early 90s from
USENET and the BBS scene, you'll see
that evolution playout. If you subscribed to the 'trade rags' of the 80s,
you'd find them talking about Copyright some,
but not much about licensing, so there were a huge number of 'licenses'
that we'd laugh at today as being
totally insane / unenforceable / unclear / etc... There were also some
presentations at DECUS in the mid 80s
(and maybe earlier) on the topic as well as their distribution of tapes got
large enough...

There was also a pointer to Jeremy C Reed's
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/2013/12/Features186.html
as well as his book on BSD history
http://www.reedmedia.net/books/bsd-history/ (which I'd love to get a copy
of).
It wasn't clear if it had been published or not from the link

I'd love to see John's handout...

Warner

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 8:51 AM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:

> The community used to be much more ignorant/naive about copyrights. It
> wasn't until the GPL and the CSRG conversion to GCC and Gilmore's "free the
> tree" efforts there that copyright was really seen as anything other than a
> claim of ownership. I'd also add the Apache Foundation and their CLA
> agreements. Anyone have a copy of John's handout from early Usenix
> conferences? :)
>
>