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> We may never know precisely how much more powerful the ideology of software freedom made us as developers Just try to describe what the world would be like w

• matt4077 10y ago
  .doc instead of .html was a real possibility at some point. The horror! The horror! We'd be living in a pink & blue Information-disneyland, paying monthly fees to AOL and Microsoft, getting Cyberclippy to play our companies' jingles to non-premium users every 12 minutes.
• jonsen 10y ago
  Software engineering would probably be more of, well, more of engineering, and less of hacking, like all the other —thriving— fields of engineering, implying higher quality and more accountability.
  • wtetzner 10y ago
    Do you have any evidence to support that? I don't see that any software companies now do anything like engineering. Whether it's open source or not, "Software Engineering" is still basically just hacking.
    • jonsen 10y ago
      Mostly just hacking. There are areas where quality and accountability matters. Space and aviation for example. I'd say Windows and what came of that taught the common user horde to accept junk, so now it is hard to sell quality at a higher price regardsless of free software.