History
The first use of a time bomb in software may have been with the Scribe markup language and word processing system, developed by Brian Reid. Reid sold Scribe to a software company called Unilogic, and agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time bomb feature.
Richard Stallman saw this as a betrayal of the programmer ethos. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access (see MIT's hacker culture declines).
Read more about this topic: Time Bomb (software)
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