POSS Chap 1 Part 1.1.2
De Framalang Wiki.
Accidental resistance
There were many other things going on in the nascent free software scene, however, and few were as explictly ideological as Stallman's GNU Project. One of the most important was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a gradual re-implementation of the Unix operating system—which up until the late 1970's had been a loosely proprietary research project at AT&T—by programmers at the University of California at Berkeley. The BSD group did not make any overt political statements about the need for programmers to band together and share with one another, but they practiced the idea with flair and enthusiasm, by coordinating a massive distributed development effort in which the Unix command-line utilities and code libraries, and eventually the operating system kernel itself, were rewritten from scratch mostly by volunteers. The BSD project became a prime example of non-ideological free software development, and also served as a training ground for many developers who would go on to remain active in the open source world.
Another crucible of cooperative development was the X Window System, a free, network-transparent graphical computing environment, developed at MIT in the mid-1980's in partnership with hardware vendors who had a common interest in being able to offer their customers a windowing system. Far from opposing proprietary software, the X license deliberately allowed proprietary extensions on top of the free core—each member of the consortium wanted the chance to enhance the default X distribution, and thereby gain a competitive advantage over the other members. X Windows[6] itself was free software, but mainly as a way to level the playing field between competing business interests, not out of some desire to end the dominance of proprietary software. Yet another example, predating the GNU project by a few years, was TeX, Donald Knuth's free, publishing-quality typesetting system. He released it under a license that allowed anyone to modify and distribute the code, but not to call the result "TeX" unless it passed a very strict set of compatibility tests (this is an example of the "trademark-protecting" class of free licenses, discussed more in Chapter 9, Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents). Knuth wasn't taking a stand one way or the other on the question of free-versus-proprietary software, he just needed a better typesetting system in order to complete his real goal—a book on computer programming—and saw no reason not to release his system to the world when done.
Without listing every project and every license, it's safe to say that by the late 1980's, there was a lot of free software available under a wide variety of licenses. The diversity of licenses reflected a corresponding diversity of motivations. Even some of the progammers who chose the GNU GPL were much less ideologically driven than the GNU project itself. Although they enjoyed working on free software, many developers did not consider proprietary software a social evil. There were people who felt a moral impulse to rid the world of "software hoarding" (Stallman's term for non-free software), but others were motivated more by technical excitement, or by the pleasure of working with like-minded collaborators, or even by a simple human desire for glory. Yet by and large these disparate motivations did not interact in destructive ways. This is partly because software, unlike other creative forms like prose or the visual arts, must pass semi-objective tests in order to be considered successful: it must run, and be reasonably free of bugs. This gives all participants in a project a kind of automatic common ground, a reason and a framework for working together without worrying too much about qualifications beyond the technical.
Developers had another reason to stick together as well: it turned out that the free software world was producing some very high-quality code. In some cases, it was demonstrably technically superior to the nearest non-free alternative; in others, it was at least comparable, and of course it always cost less. While only a few people might have been motivated to run free software on strictly philosophical grounds, a great many people were happy to run it because it did a better job. And of those who used it, some percentage were always willing to donate their time and skills to help maintain and improve the software.
This tendency to produce good code was certainly not universal, but it was happening with increasing frequency in free software projects around the world. Businesses that depended heavily on software gradually began to take notice. Many of them discovered that they were already using free software in day-to-day operations, and simply hadn't known it (upper management isn't always aware of everything the IT department does). Corporations began to take a more active and public role in free software projects, contributing time and equipment, and sometimes even directly funding the development of free programs. Such investments could, in the best scenarios, repay themselves many times over. The sponsor only pays a small number of expert programmers to devote themselves to the project full time, but reaps the benefits of everyone's contributions, including work from unpaid volunteers and from programmers being paid by other corporations.
