Unix, one of the earliest computer-operating systems, was developed
between the late nineteen-sixties and the early nineteen-eighties, by
A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories and various universities around the
world, notably the University of California, Berkeley. It was the
product of a highly collaborative process, in which researchers and
students built and shared their code in an atmosphere of excitement and
discovery that was fostered, in part, by an agreement that A.T. & T.
representatives had signed, in 1956, with the Department of Justice,
circumscribing the company’s commercial activities in exchange for an
end to antitrust proceedings. But in 1982, A.T. & T. was broken up
and its agreement with the department ended; before long, the company
was selling copies of Unix without including the source code from which
it was derived, effectively commercializing the operating system and
hiding its building blocks within a proprietary program. The move
greatly upset many in the programming community, including Richard
Stallman, a software developer in his late twenties who was then working
at M.I.T.’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
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