The Berkeley code was intermixed with
proprietary AT&T code. As a result, Berkeley
distributions were available only to institutions that
already had a Unix source license from AT&T. As AT&T
raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at
first seemed innocuous, became increasingly burdensome.
Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project
of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment
Corporation's PDP-11 computer. It was during this
period, Bostic says, that he came into close
interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional
forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly
arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at
borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go
to dinner afterward and continue arguing about
copyright over dinner."
The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the
way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley
separated its networking code from the rest of the
AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a
University of California license.
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