Comment by bityard

Sure, if you invent a time machine and rewrite how things actually evolved.

Early on, you mostly had only two kinds of code: Proprietary software whose source code is closely guarded as a trade secret, contrasted with open software where the source code is quite deliberately shared with the world as widely as possible. The former was code owned by companies, the latter was generally academics and hobbyists.

It's only somewhat recently that there has been a fairly large gray area between those two, mostly from companies who want to capitalize on the warm fuzzy feels of Open Source in their marketing material while building a moat that doesn't allow others to do much without the missing proprietary bit, or because the license doesn't allow redistribution, to pick to random examples.