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Very true, and I'm wondering now why this wasn't a Thing in the old days. The obvious answer is "no distribution mechanism for shipping libraries separately fro
by mrec 10y ago
Very true, and I'm wondering now why this wasn't a Thing in the old days. The obvious answer is "no distribution mechanism for shipping libraries separately from the machine/OS/compiler/interpreter", but that's not entirely true.
The pre-internet Amiga had a thriving public domain and shareware scene where volunteers would advertise in the magazines and you could pick and choose apps/demos/games for the price of postage and a floppy disk. But it was all binary, no source, and I don't remember any libraries ever being distributed that way. Maybe dev tools were too fragmented for that to be practical.
- usrusr 10y agoTake a look at early open source licenses, those that did not make it into the present (e.g. the POV-ray licence). Even people who opened their sources where often fiercely protective of their creations. Today it's usually all about protecting the creator (from various kinds of litigation), only the GPL adds a bit of impersonal "for the cause" flavor. The extinct licences, in contrast, were often bristling with protection of personal attribution. "Mine forever" used to be a big concern. Today there is the idea that being the one person who knows more about a piece of code than the rest of humanity combined is a thing of value by itself and that this does not require protection. Letting your code free won't take that away from you, at least not as long as you care. I guess that idea just wasn't part of the mindset of that age.
- mrec 10y ago> Letting your code free won't take that away from you, at least not as long as you care. Good point, and maybe this genuinely wasn't true back then. It would have been much easier to pass someone else's code off as your own back before Google and Github and GrepCode and so on.