Let’s leave alone for a moment the fact that the most permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) were not really designed, as much as they appeared out of historical accidents as a “just don’t bother us” device...
When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one.
The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3).
The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job).
In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.
When it comes to licenses that were written “with a plan”, there is a charitable reading and an uncharitable one.
The charitable reading is that, back then, it was assumed that every computer user, local or remote, would have access to a compiler; and that any user would eventually learn how to operate a compiler, hence making it obvious that they would want to mod and compile the software they ran. And then they saw the licenses worked well enough to develop an ecosystem, and more or less left it at that (unless explicitly threatened, as they did when reacting to freeloading trends in embedding with the GPL 3).
The less charitable reading is that they left the door open precisely because they knew it ensured demand for service providers and system administrators (which many of the original “foss hackers” were, in their day job).
In any case, I don’t think anyone would have predicted they would become so dominant; everyone just assumed the big commercial vendors would be around forever, and FOSS would always be the underdog ecosystem; hence, leaving certain activities commercially unburdened would have always been somewhat necessary.