Although delayed by a
legal challenge from Unix Systems Laboratories-the AT&T
spin-off that retained ownership of the Unix brand
name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early
1990s. Even before then, however, many of the Berkeley
utilities would make their way into Stallman's GNU Project.
"I think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have
gone as strongly as we did without the GNU influence,"
says Bostic, looking back. "It was clearly something
where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea."
By the end of the 1980s, the GPL was beginning to exert
a gravitational effect on the free software community.
A program didn't have to carry the GPL to qualify as
free software-witness the case of the BSD utilities-but
putting a program under the GPL sent a definite
message. "I think the very existence of the GPL
inspired people to think through whether they were
making free software, and how they would license it,"
says Bruce Perens, creator of Electric Fence, a popular
Unix utility, and future leader of the Debian GNU/Linux
development team.
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