NASA licensed one $3 copy, but we didn't know why until ~a year later (just a guess how long it was) then found they'd had a team analyzing lots of software options, so by 2003 or so we knew it was for a next-gen telescope.
SE was never "open source" in the standard sense, although almost everyone who licensed it got the source. In the very early nineties I was contact by people to say that what I'd been working on should be "open sourced" in the "free beer" context. I needed money to pay rent, put shoes on the kids' feet, and stuff like that, so didn't understand how to get paid for free software. They said "people will pay you to customize it, or to fix bugs" and I said "it's already ultra-customizable and I don't release software with bugs". I kind of get it now, and if I could talk to my old self I would tell self to open-source at least parts so that there was no reason for anyone NOT to use it. So now I'm working on inventing a time machine to go back and tell myself that and A LOT of more important things, but the time-machine work is going very very slow.
SE was never "open source" in the standard sense, although almost everyone who licensed it got the source. In the very early nineties I was contact by people to say that what I'd been working on should be "open sourced" in the "free beer" context. I needed money to pay rent, put shoes on the kids' feet, and stuff like that, so didn't understand how to get paid for free software. They said "people will pay you to customize it, or to fix bugs" and I said "it's already ultra-customizable and I don't release software with bugs". I kind of get it now, and if I could talk to my old self I would tell self to open-source at least parts so that there was no reason for anyone NOT to use it. So now I'm working on inventing a time machine to go back and tell myself that and A LOT of more important things, but the time-machine work is going very very slow.