PeterAitch writes

"According to Reuters, Potsdam University in Germany is now teaching social skills as part of their IT courses. This is intended to 'ease entry into the world of work'. The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection(s)."

The class is taught by a superficial model, who will fall in love with the nerdiest student at the end of the semester after realizing that he is beautiful on the inside.

Each week the nerds will be tested on a combination of technical ability and geek trivia to win immunity to the social challenge. The loser of the challenge will have to leave the show to the bellow of Ogre from "Revenge of the Nerds."

You realize that Bell Labs was a profit-seeking entity right? And that Unix was provided for a fee as early as 1973? That in fact Bell Labs required a (small) fee per license in its agreement with AT&T? The only reason it hadn't been done from the start was a) lack of market and b) AT&T was operating under a consent decree regarding the Bell monopoly that prohibited it from non-telephone commercial activity. Since Bell Labs insisted, it required a very small fee. It was free (speech) because distributing binaries when there wasn't even a universal architecture and the only users were professionals would have been silly. It was not free (beer) at any stage.

Open Source? Yes, as irrelevant a comparison as that is to today's world. Free Software? No. Software's practical foundations are rooted in commercial (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) or military. Neither of those are "free software"... at least not in any way resembling what that means now. When computers cost a years salary and were only owned by a few hundred institutions in the world, it is unsurprising that there was no "many eyes" interactions driving innovation.

Those large institutions and closed source might now produce inferior products, but that is irrelevant to earlier realities, regardless of what ideology might make you want to believe