How a Lock Breaks
October 3, 2026
A controlled layer lasts only as long as leaving it stays costly. Compatibility raises that cost: if everything you own works with one thing, you stay. A break in compatibility, or an open and portable alternative, lowers it. This piece follows that rule through four decades of computing, from the operating system to the processor, and ends with what it looks like when the locks are mostly open. The earlier pieces here asked who keeps the value of a standard. This one asks how the hold on one gets loosened.
Unix began at Bell Labs in 1969. [2] AT&T, which owned Bell Labs, was under a 1956 consent decree that forbade it from entering any business other than "common carrier communications services" and required it to license its patents on request, so Unix could not be sold as a product. Bell Labs "shipped the system for the cost of media and shipping." [1] The first source license went to the University of Illinois in 1975. [2]
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