Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's something fundamentally broken about the open-source model when you can invest so much time and npt get any sort of economic return. This seems like a huge limiting factor on open-source development. The problem we have is that OSS creators don't realize, and often willfully ignore, the fact that nothing about opensource says you can't charge for delivering value to people. Sure, their ability to copy it th…
I think this is maybe a reaction to the way AT&T made Unix so expensive and inaccessible to hackers for so long that the idea of charging $$$ for something whose marginal cost of production was effectively $0 that the idea of charging money was morally repulsive to a lot of key figures in the movement. In a way OSS seems like the sort of thing that would have worked great in some hypothetical enlightened communist sy…
Actually you got it wrong, it was precisely because AT&T could not legally charge the prices other vendors were selling their OSes, that UNIX got adopted by universities and small business, thus spreading its use in the industry.
The ones charging lots of money for UNIX clones were Sun, HP, Digital, HP, ...