Re: licensing of XMPP specifications

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Ben Finney writes:

> It would make your task of choosing a well-understood license easier
> if you instead used "softwaree" in its original,
> contrastted-with-hardware meaning, and not the narrow "programs only"
> meaning that some retrofit to it.

After seeing this claim made quite a few times on various Debian
lists, I was curious about the history for the claim above.  The
earliest common attribution of "software" that I could find in a
computer context is to John Stukey:

  Today the "software" comprising the carefully planned interpretive
  routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are
  at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its
  "hardware" of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.
  [ from http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_31_00.html ]

Note the "carefully planned _interpretive_ (etc)" and "aspects of
automative programming" parts of Tukey's definition.  At least in that
early, contrasted-with-hardware meaning, software was definitely not a
general term for information, but a name for the instructions that
produced function and results from a computer.  Is there some earlier
use of the word that is broader?

Michael Poole