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Here’s How To Split Rent Based On Percentage Of Income…I’ve known my partner for 8+ years.We’ve been together for 6+ yearsWe’ve lived together for 4+ years.And we’ve never had similar incomes.She’s had the steady income.I’ve been employed, unemployed, a business owner, and more.So…Over the years we decided to use a percentage-based system to split rent between the two of us.She makes between $40,000-$55,000 per year as a bartender.I’ve made between $20,000 and $120,000 in a year as a business owner/freelancer.Here’s our philosophy on living expenses and life:We believe we’re a team, and we discuss a lot of what we purchase BEFORE we purchase it.At one point, we agreed that if the purchase is $150 or more, we talk about it. If we can’t come to a majority agreement, then we wait 72 hours and revisit the purchase. If we still can’t come to an agreement, we have a default rule to not purchase for a week. If after that week we still want the thing, but we don’t agree on the purchase, we confirm that our budget can handle the expenditure and we plan to purchase it in a month.At the time of this rule, we were heavily committed to paying down our debts. Now, with a bit of breathing room and my increase in income, we’re able to be a little looser on this, while we still pay down her school loans (yes, I said we).Now, we simply communicate on our shared expenses like rent, utilities, car, and food.The individual purchases are our own to decide on. The big agreement we have with one another is that we pay for our living expenses first and our fun stuff second.More:We share the vision of buying a home, starting a family, and owning multiple vacation properties that generates some income.We have a shared goal of being debt free (I’m currently debt free, she still has her school loans. And yes, we’re both paying down her school loans. She helped me on mine and got those gone first because at the time and as of this post, I have the higher earning potential, so we got me free of any and all debt to maximize that potential).And, no, it’s not because I’m a guy. It’s because, historically, I’ve made more. Also, she’s made the conscious decision to not make more — to stay a bartender and have a good time making money. If she came to me and said she wants to go for making more, start her own business, etc, etc, you better believe I’m supporting her through that. But we’ve had those conversations, and she doesn’t want that right now.One more point:No, we’re not married, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build a life together. We’ve known one another for 8 years. We have thoroughly discussed our “big 5” when it comes to our relationship: money, religion, family, children, and love.We revisit these 5 about 2–3x per year and check in with one another.We’re humans first, partners second. We want the best for one another, and if anything in that “big 5” doesn’t align, we help one another either realign or we will separate. No hard feelings, honestly. It’s one of the reasons we’re not married yet. We’re committed to one another’s growth, not society’s expectation of what a relationship should be.Heck, we explored various types of relationships and landed on monogamy as our preferred method of commitment and intimacy.And if anything should change, we’ve agreed that we’ll be candid about it and decided if it’s better we separate, stay together, or adjust our expectations of our relationship (Yes, this means that if either of us want more than one partner, it’s a few conversations away from happening).Simple as that.#RantOverHere’s how we split rent:We set a base percentage of 30%, meaning you will never pay less than 30% of the total rent due.We then pay rent based on our percentage of income for the month against our rent.Here’s a Google Doc of the steps we take to figure this out:Rent Percentage Calculation - Two PersonHere 5 lessons we’ve learned from this model:Any increase in living expenses must, must, MUST be agreed upon and confirmed by both people. You can’t go out and rent a new home/condo/apartment that your partner can’t afford 30% of. That’s irresponsible and dumb. If you want to increase your expenditures to live a more expensive lifestyle, then it’s time you either amend your percentage agreement and pay for that extra, or help your partner find a way to make more. Remember, it’s a team effort.If your life, money, and relationship goals don’t align, the person paying the higher percentage will feel cheated… because, the person paying less will “look” like they are slacking. While this may not be the case, it is what it looks like. When I cleared 6-figures for the first time, I resented my partner because she didn’t follow me up in income. But then we talked about it. She’s not ready to pursue making more money, she’s enjoying the bartender’s life. And I’m supportive of that because I want her as a human, not as an income source. Ultimately, we want both of us to do what we enjoy doing, make money, and live the life we want. We’re nearly debt free, so we have little-to-no stress in covering our expenses, even on a lower income. When we weren’t stress-free, we worked our tails off to pinch every single penny to get where we are today financially.Live below your means. Pay off consumer debt. Invest the extra into stocks, real estate, experiences, a business, etc. I cannot stress this enough. If you allow your life expenses to creep up with your income level, you will never “get ahead.” It’s mathematically impossible. You don’t have to live cheap… but don’t live a lavish lifestyle unless you are willing to sacrifice in other areas in your life — and that’s if you can even afford it. Be candid with your money situation and suck it up, buttercup.Ask for financial help from one another as a last, last, last resort. This may sound counterintuitive, but my partner and I have agreed that unless we’re in the final hour of needing help with money, we figure it out on our own. This is a way to hold one another accountable for our spending and saving. Yes, we’ve told one another “no” before when we’ve asked for help, which resulted in some pretty painful financial trials and tribulations. However, we’ve not made those mistakes twice, which means we’re better off for it in the long run as individuals and a couple. Harsh? Sure. Effective? You bet.Communicate to understand one another before prescribing a solution. This is tough for most people because we all have “answers” to the questions or “solutions” to the problems. However… it’s more important to help the other person grow through a tough time than it is to solve their problem for them. Approach conversations about money with curiosity and compassion. Stay true to your boundaries and goals, but also keep in mind that you’re a team, a couple, a partnership.So, there you have it.A bit more than asked for, but I do believe the context matters.The reason behind why we operate this way is important (at least to us).I hope this helps.Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

NO. Solar power has proven an abject failure as an alternative to fossil fuels, notwithstanding massive subsidies world wide. Wind and solar cannot provide electricity without the assistance of fossil fuels as back up to cover for intermittency.Solar farms subsidies in the UK exceed the value of the electricity they produce.Fossil fuels are here to stay and energy markets ignore wind and solar making the vast government subsidies a vast waste.I agree with the critique by Michael Moore’s just released docu that the favorite alternative energies of the green movement - wind and solar are not green at all and much worse than fossil fuels. They are in fact a scam not providing the benefits they claim.We must accept the reality of intermittency and double costing when governments foolishly invest in these renewable.We must accept the waste and cost in coal and fossil fuels needed to build these ugly monstrosities.We must accept the reality building a wind and solar plants would take up valuable land to the point of absurdity if the goal is total replacement of fossil fuels.MICHAEL MOORE : ‘Green Energy Is A Scam’Posted: April 22, 2020 | Author: Jamie Spry |Planet of the Humans | By Jeff Gibbs, Executive Producer Michael Moore“The documentary does a good jobat proving that conservativeswere right to say that green energy is a scam““This urgent, must-see movie,a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows,is guaranteed to generate anger, debate.”Declares Wind And Solar Energies A “Fata Morgana” …”Powerless And Expensive”!Top Danish Economist Bjoern Lomborg Declares Wind And Solar Energies A “Fata Morgana” …”Powerless And Expensive”!By P Gosselin on25. October 2015The German online Die Welt here has a commentary on wind energy by Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg. The title of his guest commentary: “Wind energy, powerless and expensive“.Hat-tip Peter H at Facebook.Wind and sun energy are often viewed by fossil fuel critics as the go-to green energies. But careful analyses show that these energies are in reality impractical due to their haphazard supply and very poor efficiency. Most wind installations fail to reach 20% of their rated capacities; sun only provides power when it’s daytime and not cloudy. The figures that Lomborg presents are sobering, inconvenient and totally discouraging for wind and sun power proponents.Citing the International Energy Agency, Lomborg writes so far today only 0.4% of global energy comes from wind and sun, despite the tens of billions of dollars invested in the energy sources. He adds:Even in 2040, if all governments stick to their promises, sun and wind will cover only 2.2 percent of the world’s energy by 2040.”Lomborg says that the reason why sun and wind will be “no decisive solution against climate change” is the energies’ inability to be effectively stored. He calls the belief that the energies are cheaper than fossil fuels a “Fata Morgana”.The problem remains that storage technologies today are cumbersome, horrendously expensive and thus unfeasible. Wind and sun remain a luxury for the rich. Lomborg explains to readers how wind energy are dependent on subsidies, and that without them they make no sense. The Danish star economist points out that not only do wind and sun need subsidies, but now also so do fossil fuel plants so that they can remain on standby when the wind and sun go AWOL. He also says that wind and sun only save about half of the claimed CO2 emissions, and that under some circumstances they actually cause greater emissions.$131 trillion for 1°C less warmingHe writes the planned expansion of green energies by the year 2040 will cost 2.3 trillion dollars and result in only in a mere 0.o175 °C less temperature rise by the end of the century (using the climate forcing figures provided by the climate models).That means 1°C of theoretical less warming would cost 131 trillion dollars! If there ever was a new definition for insanity, that’s it.Top Danish Economist Bjoern Lomborg Declares Wind And Solar Energies A “Fata Morgana” …”Powerless And Expensive”!Analysis Shows Wind And Solar Power In Europe Is On Average 16 Times More Expensive Than Gas-Fired Power!By P Gosselin on8. February 2015Charting the costs and effectiveness of renewable energy in Europe A comparison of both the capital cost and energy production effectiveness of renewable energy in Europe. By Ed Hoskins (Some editing by P Gosselin) The diagrams below show the cost and capacity factors of the major European renewable energy power sources: onshore and offshore wind farms […]Serial Exaggerator Al Gore Loses All Sense Of Reality…Exaggerates German Wind And Solar Power 178%By P Gosselin on22. June 2014When listening to Al Gore’s numbers and figures, we really do need to worry that he may have completely lost his sense of reality. Otherwise we can only conclude that he is a stunningly unscrupulous fraud. Image cropped from: Rush Limbaugh site. In Gore’s self-imagined climate-crisis world, global temperatures are accelerating, the center of the […]Search results for "wind and solar"April 22, 2020Michael Moore stumbles upon the truth about so-called 'green' energyBy Andrea WidburgMICHAEL MOORE : ‘Green Energy Is A Scam’New Michael Moore-backed doc examines "false promise" of renewable energyimage credit: Featureflash Photo Agency / http://Shutterstock.MY COMMENT PUBLISHED BY THE DELINGPOLE STORYjamesmatkinwritings PERMALINKApril 24, 2020 4:47 pmMoore is right to bring down wind and solar as alternatives to fossil fuels and surely the collateral damage to the Paris Accord falls as well. The gang up in Paris on CO2 by tax happy governments was always two step. Get rid of fossil fuels so clean energy(??) would take over. This means if the second step is gone then the first step of crushing fossil fuels is madness. Time to endorse the 90 Leading Italian Scientists Petition urging governments that there is no climate crisis –“In conclusion, given the CRUCIAL IMPORTANCE THAT FOSSIL FUELS have for the energy supply of humanity, we suggest that they should not adhere to policies of uncritically reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere with THE ILLUSORY PRETENSE OF CONTROLLING THE CLIMATE.”90 Leading Italian Scientists Sign Petition: CO2 Impact On Climate “UNJUSTIFIABLY EXAGGERATED” … Catastrophic Predictions “NOT REALISTIC”MAIN DELINGPOLE STORY -Career Climate Skeptic James Delingpole: punchablefaces.Simple. Moore has backed the most powerful, brutally honest and important documentary of his career. It’s also by far his bravest because it not only confronts the modern left’s greatest shibboleth — “clean” energy — but it does indeed offer a great deal of succour to Moore’s avowed enemy President Donald Trump.It might even help Trump clinch the next presidential election for it undermines the entire basis of the Green New Deal being pushed in one form or another by his opponents. Renewable energy, the documentary makes abundantly clear, is not the solution to the problem — but an even bigger problem than the one it is supposedly solving.The documentary was directed by Jeff Gibbs, who, like Moore, is very much a man of the left. Gibbs was a producer and composer on Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. In his youth, he was the kind of committed, long-haired eco activist who sabotages diggers by putting sugar in their gas tanks.And it’s this left-wing, activist background of Gibbs and Moore which makes the movie’s message so much more compelling.Renewable energy, it tells us, is not clean energy but dirty energy because it does tremendous damage to the environment. The people who make money out of it are the worst kind of crony-capitalists. Anyone who claims to believe otherwise is either an idiotic dupe or a wicked liar.90 Leading Italian Scientists Sign Petition: CO2 Impact On Climate “UNJUSTIFIABLY EXAGGERATED” … Catastrophic Predictions “NOT REALISTIC”INTERMITTENCY IS THE STUMBLING BLOCK FOR RENEWABLESThe heart of the matter is the intermittency of wind and solar when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine at the most inopportune times. The hope was for new battery storage technology to cover the gap. This is not happening. Sadly, I have personal experience working as a director with two truly innovative new battery technology start ups. Both have struggled for 5 years and counting and no light at the end of the tunnel. See the reason -The Battery Cycle – Setting the Record StraightBy Anthony Milewski, Chairman, Cobalt 27March 7, 2019in Technology Metals Edition InsightHow long does it take from a scientific breakthrough to commercial battery production? From discovery of a new material to inclusion into a chemistry to wide spread commercial use can take between 10 and 20 years. The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research has come up with a matrix for thinking about the actual time it takes for this process:·Scientific discovery of a new material(s) or process. There is no time frame for this.·New class of material synthesized. Scientists may spend one to two years on this step.·Prove performance of the half cell. Between two to five years.·Proven performance of lab scale fuel cells. Between two to five years.·Material scale-up, cell testing, and scaling up to pack. Between five to ten years.The implications of this matrix are profound for the batteries that power EVs and should be considered by investors.The Battery Cycle – Setting the Record Straight - Anthony Milewski, Cobalt 27Flat Broke & Busted: German Wind Turbine Maker Senvion’s Spectacular Financial CollapseApril 14, 2019 by stopthesethings 4 CommentsCut the subsidies and the wind industry would disappear in a heartbeat. The business model (read ‘colossal government mandated scam’) has all the hallmarks of an enormous Ponzi scheme – the wind industry’s demise is a matter of when, not if. The withdrawal of subsidies across Europe has taken its toll, as the number of new turbines erected plummets. Twelve countries in the European Union (EU) failed to install “a single wind turbine” last year.Saddled with debt and peddling the world’s worst wind turbines hasn’t helped German turbine maker Senvion, either.Its parent, the Indian outfit Suzlon suffered India’s biggest convertible-bond default in 2012 – was seriously struggling then and isn’t in any better shape now – even a name change to “Senvion” didn’t help.In 2015, a debt-ridden Suzlon and struggling Senvion parted company, with a US firm, Centerbridge Partners throwing €1 billion at the wreckage in the hope some of it could be salvaged.Four years on and it’s clear that Senvion was terminal.Here’s a couple of pieces from Germany on only the latest renewable energy outfit to face total collapse. And the, oh so tragic ‘disaster’, has a run of serious knock-on consequences for wind farms and RE rent seekers here in Australia, as we’ll detail below…Lincoln Gap (just to the west of Port Augusta in SA) is touted as the latest thing in wind farms, with claims that it will have a bigger-than-Ben-Hur battery to account for the weather – ie the fact they can only ever deliver power around 30% of the time and at crazy, random intervals. The project was meant to comprise 59 turbines. However, at last count there are only about 8 or 10 that look anything like complete. With Senvion’s sudden and monumental collapse the chances of completing the balance of the project now, look pretty thin.Adding to our sense of delicious schadenfreude is the fact that the key backer of Nexif (the firm that owns the part finished project) is the one and only Alex Turnbull. Alex is the son of Malcolm, the Liberal PM dumped by his party for his renewable energy obsession.Alex’s relationship with the embattled wind power outfit, Infigen is the stuff of legend: Born Lucky: Stars Align Perfectly for PM’s Son with Mammoth Bet on Wind Power Outfit InfigenAs to the Singapore based Nexif and its stalled Lincoln Gap project, STT understands that Turnbull & Son went to great lengths to secure a power purchase agreement with Snowy Hydro to finance the project, along with a pile of cash from the Federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Another case of it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.Well, it seems that this is one that Daddy can’t fix in a hurry. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.Flat Broke & Busted: German Wind Turbine Maker Senvion’s Spectacular Financial CollapseSOLAR FARMS GET MILLIONS MORE IN TAXPAYER HANDOUTS THAN THEY MAKE SELLING ELECTRICITYDate: 13/05/19Daily MailTen of UK’s biggest solar farms pocketed £3million plus in eco subsidies last yearTotal cost of providing subsidies to renewables market is estimated at £7billionThe plants were encouraged to get off the ground with generous handoutsBritain’s biggest solar farms get more money in taxpayer subsidies than they make from selling the electricity they produce.The plants were encouraged to get off the ground with generous handouts, funded from ‘green taxes’ on fuel bills.Now many of them make the majority of their cash from the subsidies.Some farms have been snapped up by private firms, venture capitalists and pension funds which realise they are guaranteed money-spinners, in part because of the Government-backed handouts.But critics say the system, which often guarantees the handouts for 15 or 20 years, has been way too generous and skewed the energy market – leading to bigger household electricity bills.Dr John Constable, director of charity Renewable Energy Foundation, which publishes data on the energy sector, said: ‘The legacy entitlements are costing consumers dearly and will continue to do so for many years to come.‘In order to remain internationally competitive, the UK needs to scrape every barnacle off the hull of the economy – retrospective cuts to renewables subsidies cannot be ruled out.’Ten of the UK’s biggest solar farms pocketed £3million or more each in eco subsidies in 2017/18, statistics from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) reveal.The total cost of providing subsidies to the renewables market is estimated at around £7billion – of which about £1billion filters through to solar energy.Treasury officials ended new subsidies to solar farms in 2014 but existing farms are still guaranteed generous handouts until the end of their contracts.Solar Farms Get Millions More in Taxpayer Handouts Than They Make Selling ElectricityMikeWW, Grand Rapids, United States, 11 months agoSolar energy companies consume more energy in their operations than they can ever produce with their inefficient, land-hogging, toxic-chemical-laden panels. That's why they will always lose money in the free market, even if the cost of fossil fuels increases. They can only make money by feeding at the government trough.Solar farms get more in taxpayer handouts than in selling electricityWEATHER WRECKS HAVOC WITH SOLAR OUTPUT INCLUDING RAINSolar field destroyed by the weather.

I was a little surprised that so many people tried to answer this question, circled around the answer, but really did not answer it correctly. Instead, some authors have fallen into the ‘popular’ (urban legend) style answer as opposed to what really happened. I realized that so much of the actual answer is because so many of the things that happened, occured at a time before many of you were on the scene (so I should not be surprised). In the interest of trying to get history right and having been a small-time protagonist / lived a bit of the drama, I’ll try to explain it as best I can and offer places for you to research and form some of your own opinions.The short answer which you have been given is that Linux is a current implementation of the UNIX ideas or trade secrets – which does makes it “UNIX” via the ‘Turing test’ – it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, even tastes like duck when you cook it. The US courts have actually defined this (even as Linux was being born as you will see). As was amply described by others, Linux is a rewrite of the UNIX ideas even though it is not wholly based on the original UNIX source code that was originally derived from AT&T. Please remember Linux is not the only rewrite of UNIX and is hardly the first. It is the most successful – see my answer to Would it be possible/advantageous to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust when the language is stable?The key point to remember here is that the UNIX ideas/trade secrets are open and ‘free.’ The source code (primarily C) to the original UNIX implementation while ‘open,’ was also ‘licensed’ and that license required a nominal fee for academics and larger ‘fair and reasonable’ one –for commercial folks (more in a minute).Thus, you are actually correct in that Linux is built on UNIX trade secrets but that is different from using the licensed implementation, which is what some folks seem to be getting excited. That said, we need to remember that the Linux source is also licensed. It turns out the terms of the Linux license (the GPLv2) has restrictions that require the user to make the sources of Linux available at no direct cost if some person asks you for them, instead of requiring that user to pay fees for them. This is the typical definition of ‘free’ as in ‘beer’ part of the “Free and Open Source Software.”As I like to say: The original UNIX implementation was and is Open Source Software which was different from many other commercial systems of the day. While Linux, and current other UNIX implementations such as current BSD implementations of UNIX are both ‘Free and Open Source Software.’Now that I’ve explained the end state, let’s look at what happened, why this so confusing to someone coming in from outside the UNIX/Linux community, and why it sometime gets a little contentious - particularly if you only know some of the history. Things like the SCO case et al. are fairly late in the game and are not actually the real basis for why Linux is ‘open’ – contrary to the belief of a lot of hackers (to be honest, I believed the same until I was suddenly educated in the early 1990s – more in a minute). It’s confusing but fascinating to consider the history.The real history here all goes back to an argument/legal entanglement between the US gov. and AT&T with the 1949 anti-trust suit (History of AT&T - Wikipedia) and “AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market” (John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, volume 2, issue 2, article.) The argument was settled with the 1956 ‘consent decree’ that had extremely important side effects for us in the computer and electronics businesses. Quote from Wikipedia here:In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit aimed at forcing the divestiture of Western Electric, which was settled seven years later by AT&T's agreement to confine its products and services to common carrier telecommunications and license its patents to "all interested parties." A key effect of this was to ban AT&T from selling computers despite its key role in electronics research and development. Nonetheless, technological innovation continued.My non-legal description of the decree is in return for granting AT&T a legal monopoly for the phone business in the USA, AT&T had to agree to a number of behaviors. One of them was they were not allowed to be in the computer business (and IBM was not allowed to compete with AT&T in the phone business either BTW), but the other was that all AT&T had to agree to continue to work with the academic research community and industry at large as it had done in the past, but must make all of its inventions available to the academic community at no charge and license them for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ – but remember all of those licenses were monitored by the US gov.The first major invention that we outside of AT&T got from the decree was the transistor. While it was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories (a.k.a. BTL or Bell Labs) in Murray Hill, NJ; clearly it was places like Fairchild Semiconductor, TI, Intel etc. that would make the money on the invention. We as consumers and as a society clearly have benefited greatly. AT&T simply had to the license the device (the transistor) to anyone and they did. In fact, AT&T had an office in Murray Hill called the patent and license group whose sole job was to write those licenses for firms that wanted them (side note – this is how UNIX got its start, as a word processing system for those same folks, but that’s a different story and described elsewhere).Key point #1 is that by the late 1960s, early 1970s when UNIX comes on the scene, AT&T is required by law to license its technologies to everyone and actually has processes and procedures to do just that.We know that over time the world’s largest and most complex computer system was being developed in the Bell System, the phone switching network; but remember, AT&T is not allowed to be in the computer business. However, doing computing research made perfect sense for them, given what they did build, since the core of telephone system was a computer. And as a side product of building the phone network, just like the transistor, another core technology started to be created by them, software and algorithms, which would of course lead to UNIX (but I’m ahead of myself). The Murray Hill team has PhD Mathematicians, Physicists, and others of said academic bend, that continue to publish papers about the ideas in the open literature describing those ideas which are quite different from all other computer systems being discussed at the time in the same places. They developed the code and ran it internally; just like they built transistors and used them, so their research was also ‘applied’ or in patent terms ‘reduced to practice.’ Note the original Ken and Dennis UNIX paper was published in: CACM July 74, Vol 17, No 7 Pages 365-375.So, by 1974 when they publish the UNIX paper, AT&T has a technology it is not allowed to directly sell, and in fact it is required to make the technology available to ‘all interested parties’ … but … because they have published about it and it drew outside interest, quickly the academic community starts asking about it. By the rules of the 1956 consent decree, AT&T was required to make it available to them. The Murray Hill Technology license office did so with the only fee being a ~$100 tape copying charge (which even was reported to have not been collected sometimes if you brought a disk to Ken and he copied the bits for you instead of mailing – a little known factoid). Anyway, the small fee covered what it cost AT&T to write and mail the tape. The key point is that if you were an academic institution it was extremely easy to get a license for UNIX and copies of the UNIX implementation from Ken and Dennis and many, eventually most, did.Note the description of code was ‘open’, as it was published in journals, papers and books, plus the sources themselves used to build the entire system were ‘freely shared.’ At the time, we had conferences and traded code back and forth. I was and am still part of that. In fact, I am a past President of USENIX Association that was created to make sure sharing of information easy USENIX Notes 2010 04 . It was very much what we now call the ‘open source culture’ as different groups modified the code. The most famous collection of modifications to the UNIX trade secrets became the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) from the EECS dept. at UC Berkeley (UCB) and distributed to their licensees (which of course all had an AT&T license).So here is where it gets a little messy and possibly hard for the modern user to understand. What has changed really is the economics behind the open source culture and the cost to be a member of the same. The real ‘barrier to entry’ to use UNIX was not the cost of the code, but the cost of the hardware to run it on. A smallish DEC PDP-11/40 class system such as an PDP 11/34 with max memory (256K bytes) would just barely suffice to run UNIX, but that was on the order of $50K-$150K after disk, tapes, etc. If you wanted a PDP 11/70 class system which could address as much as 4M bytes, it was closer to $250K. So another key point is that in those days, you did not own the hardware yourself, you used a system owned/operated by someone else.Even when a ‘commercial’ UNIX license was purchased, which added an additional $20K to the cost of the system, the real cost of a UNIX installation was the cost of acquiring the hardware to run it. I think this is issue is forgotten and is what tends to put some people off today when the history gets written. Having access to that kind of hardware was sometimes not quite so easy. Because the hardware cost was so expensive, you needed to be part of group that did. Most researchers were academics at Universities and that is where we tended to have access to the equipment.But not all universities were as liberal with access to the resulting system. This meant that easy access to the UNIX source code as it was at MIT, CMU or UCB in USA or Cambridge, Edinburgh, Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands), CERN or the like in Europe; was at many institutions not available. In fact, some academic institutions were known to be particularly difficult to get access to computing resources, particularly if you were an undergraduate in those days. A number of my friends about 10-15 year younger than I or some the same age from very large public institutions have expressed to me the difficulties they had trying to obtain access to the sources, and have they felt that in those days UNIX was a ‘club.’ I’ll accept that observation but you needed to be able to have access to the hardware to be part of the ‘sources club’ and not students all could, but once you met the hardware membership, the sources themselves were free and open and the IP (trade secret) always was available to anyone that could read English, even if you we not part of that ‘club.’My point here is that the cost of the installation was high due to the hardware cost not the software cost or its availablity, which is the opposite of today. Software and training to use the software is what most dominates the cost of a computing environment in today’s world (thank you Moore’s law).As a result of such high value for their computing facilities institutions often kept access to the UNIX source locked up at the local installation. It is this action that makes many current users claim UNIX was ‘closed’ and in fact if you were a developer at that time and did not have someone providing you access to hardware, chances were you as a developer were not going to see the software sources either. So, I’m sympathetic to the claim; although as I said, the problem was not with UNIX or its license, it was the economics of the time that different intuitions solved in different ways. (I personally, as did most system folks of those days, made sure I was employed by someone with a license, so it never really seemed to be an issue for me.)But the story is hardly over, for instance, Linux is not even on the scene yet! The courts make a huge change on January 1, 1984. AT&T is broken up; and with it the 1956 consent decree is abolished. So now the UNIX ideas become an interesting issue.AT&T has spent that last 10 years teaching the academic community about a different way to build computers. AT&T has demanded its supplier (DEC) support the AT&T technology in its product for them. Their own employees have been the primary authors of numerous text books on different techniques, from compilers to how UNIX itself was built! Companies have been formed to build systems to run just their technology. In today's, vernacular, UNIX has gone ‘viral’ and has a bit of a life of its own.So by the First of January 1984 the difference between the UNIX ideas and UNIX source code implementation start to become acute. Is UNIX the C source code or is UNIX the ideas that Ken and Dennis wrote about in 1974? This is the crux to your own question, why it is confusing, and why so many people get it wrong.At the time, the hacker community, of which I was a part, answered the question ‘it was the C sources that we got from AT&T that said ‘Copyright AT&T …’ mumble’. The belief (urban legend) was that as long as we did not use any code from AT&T, we were not using AT&T’s ideas (boy, were we wrong – but I digress again).Part of the problem was some legal precedent has been set in the 1970s, both concerning sources, and publication. Apple had published the sources to the BIOS for the Apple-II computer in its user manual, which was in fact common for computers in the day. A Philadelphia company, Franklin Computer, created an Apple-II ‘clone’ and by retyping the source and making a few small changes, created a new binary image BIOS for their own product. The original sources were copyright by Apple, but the question for the US courts was did the copyright protect the binary results in the ROM or just the code on the paper in the book? Apple sued and won Apple vs Franklin - Wikipedia. Around the same time, IBM has also published the sources to its BIOS for the IBM PC, so when Compaq and other later PC clone vendors appeared, the solution developed had been to take two teams. One team was ‘dirty’ and read the IBM source BIOS listing, but wrote function descriptions of the contents. A ‘clean’ team which never saw the actual IBM code, took the functional descriptions and implemented a new BIOS. Then example user code was tested against both the IBM and clone BIOS and it was repeated until the same behavior was obtained with BIOS implementations.Thus, from two cloning experiences, there was an agreed upon model in the computing business of how to create something that some had a defined “copywrite” – take an existing specification of the sources, ensure that the none of your actual developers (the actual writers of the code) were never able to see the original copywritten source and become a ‘clean room team’ using the functional descriptions generated by the first team (dirty team) and second team can build the new system from the specs alone. This will have important implications for UNIX (and Linux and another other clone – in a minute).In fact, the scheme was so popular firms popped up to do just that. I was a Sr. Scientist at Locus Computing, which was the premier UNIX consulting house in the 80s and 90s doing exactly this type of work for the usual firms. We had large numbers of people, I was personally always on a ‘dirty team’ (which will be obvious in a minute).Also besides all of the academic work happening with UNIX, as I said, there is a huge UNIX industry that has been born. One of the things that occurs is that there are efforts both inside and out of AT&T to define what the ‘ideas’ behind UNIX really are. The first successful version was the November 1984 /usr/group standard which defined UNIX officially for the first time. Two years later it would be replaced by IEEE P1003 POSIX [note, I was a member of both groups]. I believe that the current standard is: IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition and Single UNIX Specification, Version 4, 2016 Edition. Also, note that shortly after the original P1003 standard was published the US gov. started creating its own definition of UNIX called FIPS 151, which by today has degenerated into a testing suite for POSIX conformance, see Validation Services for Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2. The key point here is that AT&T originally created UNIX, but clearly if we inside and out are all arguing about what it is, the ideas our now outside of AT&T too!So, let’s review the world in the late 1980s, early 1990s when any bright hacker is given access to Intel 386 based PC and wants to run UNIX on it:UNIX has been created by AT&T and the ideas published in the early 1974 in open literature.AT&T was required to make the UNIX ideas available and has, with now many thousands of source licenses around the world.AT&T employees have published in open literature, via books, etc. many ideas that make up UNIX including the core UNIX interfaces.An industry has been born around the UNIX technology, with a lot of firms producing products based on the ideas.IEEE has published a formal definition of the UNIX ideas.Besides the original AT&T UNIX implementation, there are a number of other implementations now in the ‘wild’ from Idris to Coherent which were written in C. Mach and Minix, were are also in C but use microkernels adding new technology, an implementation in Pascal (French SOL project), which would later become the C++/Chorus implementation just to name a few.There are also a ton of system modifications done based on the original work from Research, from Universities around the world such as CMU, MIT, Cambridge … but the version from the UC Berkeley, a.k.a. BSD clearly has a huge following and runs on just about all types of mainstream HW by the 1990s, including the Intel 386.Numerous companies are building UNIX based product, too many to name but Microsoft, IBM, DEC and at this point even AT&T themselves are a few.The team at UCB realize that their code no longer has any code left in from AT&T. As hackers, we all believed that since we no longer had code that contained an AT&T copywrite, we were not bound by the AT&T license. Some of the BSD team formed a company, called BSDi, and began to market a version of BSD UNIX that could run on a 386 based PC, starting with the BSD code and some work described in a series of DDJ articles Porting Unix to the 386: the Basic Kernel [Again, full disclosure, I helped Bill debug the original disk interface and am referenced in the articles.]It turns out getting access to the 386BSD distribution from UCB was extremely easy for any BSD licensee. It was officially available for FTP download and many licenses did grab the images – it was a very well known ‘secret’ address that was passed by word of mouth hacker to hacker.Life was good, for about $1500 you could purchase a fairly reasonable computer that had graphics, networking etc… running BSD UNIX and it was your own. Remember, this is different from before where the computer was owned by someone else. Also, the truth is if Linus had known about the FTP site, since his University was licensed for the 386BSD code; Linus could have downloaded it. However, he didn’t know about the ‘secret’ FTP site and he did have a copy of Minix, but he discovered that Minix in those days was a toy compared to BSD – so he wrote his own OS; while many of the rest of hacked on 386BSD.As I said life was good for us in 386BSD land … until … well AT&T decides to sue BSDi and UC Berkeley, see court docs from USL vs BSDi.So, a number of us hacker types get scared, we think it’s a suit based on copyright protection and 386BSD is going to go away – UNIX ‘source’ is not ‘free’ as in beer. We hear about this system that sort of works, no networking, no graphics, but it uses the 386 VM hardware and we start hacking (the rest is history). The key is that Linus has used all those materials I described above that are ‘open’ and has built a respectable clone of the UNIX ‘ideas’. He gives his sources away, asking for help, he gets it. We all help him make it better and the story ends right…But here is where we (the hackers) were wrong. The AT&T/USL suit was not about copyright, the suit was about trade secrets. AT&T is suing that UNIX is an idea, it is not about a specific implementation. If they are win, it means all of the UNIX ‘clones’ needed to be licensed!!!And in the end the US courts agreed, AT&T invented it, AT&T can define it. It’s AT&T trade secret … but …(nasty but …)The problem was that all us folks had been educated with the UNIX technologies and ideas. The court’s term for it was we were ‘mentally contaminated’ when we saw AT&T sources and read their papers. Moreover, folks like Linus and folks that build clones were contaminated with the ideas when they read books or read the POSIX specification. The point is, UNIX was a technology and an idea, but it was no longer a secret the moment they licensed it and AT&T could not claim it be.Which is an interesting ‘catch-22.’ AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to license its technologies to interested parties. So how could it have trade secrets? – good Quora question.An interesting aside, another question for the Quora readership might be what would have happened if AT&T had won the ruling, could it still be classified as secret and BSDi and UCB in violation? What would/could have happened to Linux/Minix and all the other clones [I’ve asked some legal friends and they said it would have been messy and lots of lawyers would have made money.]Ok, so BSDi/UCB wins, BSD is allowed to be ‘free’ as in beer, UNIX ideas are now legally defined as ‘unlicensed’ for us all to use, you would think it was over, settled. Of course, it was not, because while BSD was caught up in legal limbo, the hacker community moved on and ‘Linux was the bomb.’At this point, Linux is the premier UNIX implementation and is where much of the primary work is going. But what about that nasty SCO thing folks mentioned? Well of course it was not clear at the beginning that Linux would ‘win’ the copyright case, and SCO (who had the Microsoft UNIX assets of many years earlier when Microsoft got out the UNIX business) clearly wanted to try slow Linux down in some manner and/or reap some type of royalty from it by demonstrating that somehow some of copyrighted UNIX technology had made it into Linux.This time the case was about copyright, but I’ve often wondered how the SCO lawyers could ever have thought they had any chance with it given the results of the USL case. The US court had already decided, UNIX is a technology and set of ideas, it was originally a trade secret but no longer. AT&T and any whomever (which the courts I believe eventually decided was Novell) owned the ideas, but no claims could be made against the original ideas. They were published.Others have discussed this case, so I’m not going to spend much time on it, although it was important in that is seems to have finally closed the lid, as I have not heard any other legal dances of importance to the UNIX community since.You asked a seemly simple question and got an old man’s long winded answer, but I hope you see that what seems simple has some very deep rooted complexity and may not be everything that it seems. The good news is that all of the UNIX technologies are open and have been open since their inception. The primary implementations are now free as in beer too which is even better. In closing, if you want to examine the technology, I suggest reading two more of my Quora answers: Clem Cole answers: Which Linux kernel version's source code is better for newbie to read? , Clem Cole answers: How would Unix run on modern-day systems? , and then going to The Unix Heritage Society and their UNIX Source Tree Page.Someone asked me in the hall ‘what about the UNIX trademark’ – you never talked about. The reason was because in this case today it is pretty much irrelevant (that was not always true). So, I’ll add it as a closing note. Yes, there is a formal mark about what is UNIX and to be allowed to use the mark you must meet the definition of POSIX as defined by OpenGroup and complete their tests. That is a branding thing and at one time it mattered when you were trying to market your system and we used different processors and your firm was trying to find both unique differentiation and value. At one point Microsoft even made sure that Windows could meet the ‘POSIX compliant’ label and be sold as a version of UNIX - Clem Cole's answers: Is Windows POSIX compliant? Today Windows 10 actually includes a complete Linux subsystem (and repositories from Ubuntu), that you just have to turn on – go figure.Edited 2017-08-14 to fix a few typos and some of my dyslexia. Apologies– to the reader. And added the Locus reference after reminder by a friend of mine, as well as the UNIX trade mark comment. Tweaked again at the suggestion of Páll Haraldsson - many thanks for fixing the typos. Tweaked again 2017–12–15 at the request of Tom Dufall where I also added some clarity on some questions that have come to me independently.