Unlike IBM, which faced hardware competition after the departure of Gene Amdahl, Burroughs software was designed to run only on proprietary hardware. For this reason, Burroughs was free to distribute the source code of all software it sold, including the MCP, which was designed with this openness in mind. For example, upgrading required the user to recompile the system software and apply any needed local patches. At the time, this was common practice, and was necessary as it was not unusual for customers (especially large ones, such as the Federal Reserve) to modify the program to fit their specific needs. As a result, a Burroughs Users Group was formed, which held annual meetings and allowed users to exchange their own extensions to the OS and other parts of the system software suite. Many such extensions have found their way into the base OS code over the years, and are now available to all customers. As such, the MCP could be considered one of the earliest open-source projects.