Completely openfree license
From Bioperl.info
The very first Bioperl license did not have a name. It was written at the headbox (commentt box) of the lib files. It says that anyone who changes a single character in the whole source can claim his/her ownership of the lib as he/she contributed enough to the lib.
The background of openfree bioperl license.
This license is essentially freeware license. Since late 1980s, in personal computer(PC) community, there were a lot of shareware and freeware software. These software and the developers were perhaps the most important players in the present open-source and copyleft software.
Around 1990, Poor students, including Jong, had to steal PC software that were installed in Aberdeen University computer rooms and libraries. At that time, the whole Windows 3.1 OS could be pirated with around six 3.5 inch floppy disks. Microsoft Word and Wordperfect software were frequently stolen from computer lab in universities and could be re-installed in home computers. There was no proper security measure against priracy at that time, so by copying carefully, one can copy most of the installed software to other computers. However, this was a tedious and depressing job. Also, it can be very humiliating for some criminals(?). Eager students (geeks?) tend to experiment/try software whenever new versions and programs appear. Librarians knew that some students were doing that kind of illegal thing (I am sure many students who had tried many such copied software became active programmers later).
Inevitable path for shareware license
Shareware and freeware developers were the kind of people who had real passion and interest in programming. They were more like small scale hobbiest inventors. They had freer and smaller ideas that can fit to practical programming/software problems. If you look at the whole world software community as a company. Those were the researchers and pioneers. However, those people did not have any good way to approach consumers. Therefore, the shareware license was an inevitable path to take for many such developers.
* An example is open hypertext (present wiki, but run only as a standalone program) programs, since mid 1980s, that were sharewared by developers. When people ask for such shareware programs for free testing, the developers would give away the software. People who could not afford Apple hypertext system used to use those nearly free software.
Stronger license protection or freer license schemes
However, by mid 1990s, software protection technology advanced and it was more difficult to keep such shareware. Many developers put 30 day lock, or license keys to protect their software. At the same time, some developers who were probably from academic community elaborated to make more detailed and advanced free license schemes.
Bioperl attitude and openfree license.
Bioperl took perhaps the most openfree path in the software development history. The characteristics was probably from the people around Bioperl. They had a culture that was shared by many young developers. Tim's attitude toward software was related to his idealistic world of liberal, progressive and sharing community. He could be described as a Cambridge style academic hippy. Steve, even though he is much more clever in taking his own gain, was still very young and perhaps liberal and ideal enough. Overall culture around MRC, Cambridge and broadly the young bioinformatics community was open-minded, liberal, experimental and ideal. As Bioperl was the first successful global level shared bioinformaics project (in the early days, the global meant: UK, Germany and USA), it afftected the general course of bioinformatics software development in the future.
Usually, IT community is very strict and well-advanced in terms of protecting their code work. It is because codes are the major bread source for IT graduates. On the contrary, for BIT(Bioinformatics) people, software had the highest effect when they were shared freely for their own major interest of biological problem solving. In general, one can observe much more name/right protection in pure IT sect. Most bioinformatists had proper jobs already and were ready to share for maximum efficiency.
One of the major factors for the fast acceptance and boom of bioinformatics in the late 1990s is due to such attitude of mutual cooperation in the bioinformatics community through sharing codes and ideas. Therefore, bioinformatics' openfree license was not a problem to anyone.
