Midterm Assignment
My group and I will edit the Wikipedia page for Berkeley Software Distribution. The page, although more thorough than expected, does not contain enough of the history behind the development of the BSD operating system and fails to draw enough connections between BSD and the copyleft movement. Copyleft, in a nutshell, is a type of licensing agreement that basically allows users to edit a digital file as long as subsequent users may retain that same right. The file, usually a computer program, is free to use and copyleft requires that all modified versions of the file be free as well. Near its time of creation, BSD was distributed in a copyleft manner. BSD is basically an operating system derived from Unix and developed at UC Berkeley. Bob Fabry, a professor at Berkeley, obtained a copy of the original Unix system after it was presented by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at a symposium in Perdue University in 1973. Berkeley collaborated with Bell Labs in order to fix crashes and debug the software and it is this open exchange of information between Berkeley and Bell Labs that led to the software's rapid development. After more improvements were made to the recovery scheme and execute speed of the program, it was distributed for free by Berkeley graduate student Bill Joy. The more users had access to the software, the more quickly it was modified and advanced. BSD is a historic piece of software which not only influenced subsequent operating systems but also set a precedent for the free exchange of computer software.
Possible Sources:
"Why Free Software Happens" http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Papers/circus.pdf
"Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix" http://linuxjunkies.org/articles/kirkmck.pdf
"Open Source Software, A History" http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=libr_pubs
Grade
editCheck (as opposed to a check plus or check minus). Although you do cite the primary sources that you'll be using, your midterm is still missing a transcript of a conversation with either a campus or online ambassador. Also, I'm confused about what actual edits you'll be making to this article as opposed to what edits other people in your group will be making.PatBerger (talk) 07:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)