I found this interesting trivia in Amartya Sen‘s “The Argumentative Indian“. He mentions that the first ever printed book was a Chinese translation of an Indian Sanskrit treatise, Vajracchedika prajnaparamita (yes, all one phrase which means the Diamond Sutra) was printed in 868 AD. The introductory note of the printed material explicitly mentions that it was made for ‘universal free distribution‘.
I am not sure if that means ‘allow modifications of the work’, but never the less, Dr. Sen thinks this as a crowning achievement of Buddhist technologists interested in expanding public communication. Among other things, Dr.Sen does an excellent job of convincing that the habits of democracy and public debate are not unique to the West as argued by Samuel Huntington.
Is ‘free for proselitizing purposes’ the same as ‘open source free’? The Diamond Sutra (which you can see in a fabulous digital version on the British Library Turning the Pages website) was a religious text (by the way, not the first book ever printed – it is the earliest that has been discovered so far, but ‘printing’ as a technology was mentioned as soon as 593)
and it was to be freely distributed as the Bible is sometimes freely distributed – to gain converts. Modifying the text, or using it for non-religious purposes was completely out of the question…
And on a side note, there were books before there was printing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex