Christopher C. Stacy <cstacy@news.dtpq.com> wrote:
+---------------
| [Symbolics's] Customers always had all the source code and were
| free to modify it for their own purposes for use on those machines.
| (In other words, you bought some hardware, and you also bought some
| software that was "open" but legally tied to the machines.)
+---------------

For another historical data point, note that exactly the same
thing was true for the PDP-10 Monitor & CUSPS [kernel & utilities]
up through [IIRC] at least 5-Series TOPS-10 [mid-1970's?], though
one exception was the new Fortran-10 compiler [written in BLISS-10].
[The older F40 had been "open" like the rest of the code.]

[I mention this only because the PDP-10 was widely used for Lisp.]

+---------------
| An analogy in today's world would be like Microsoft and Intel getting
| together so that the entire source code for Windows and all the MS
| applications (Office, Media Player, Studio, internal development tools,
| etc.) would be provided for "free"  with every licensed Wintel machine.
| You would be free to modify all that software to your heart's content,
| but you're not supposed to run it on AMD (absent some other deal),
| and you can only share your modified versions of the Microsoft
| software with other Microsoft customers.
+---------------

Yup! That was exactly the case with TOPS-10...


-Rob

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