A few
have even accepted the GPL as a preemptive protective
mechanism for their own software programs. Even those
who reject the GPL contract as too compulsory, still
credit it as influential.
One hacker falling into this latter group was Keith
Bostic, a University of California employee at the time
of the GPL 1.0 release. Bostic's department, the
Computer Systems Research Group (SRG), had been
involved in Unix development since the late 1970s and
was responsible for many key parts of Unix, including
the TCP/IP networking protocol, the cornerstone of
modern Internet communications. By the late 1980s,
AT&T, the original owner of the Unix brand name, began
to focus on commercializing Unix and began looking to
the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, the
academic version of Unix developed by Bostic and his
Berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology.
Although the Berkeley BSD source code was shared among
researchers and commercial programmers with a
source-code license, this commercialization presented a
problem.
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