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I recall the story about Bill Gates at Harvard in the 70's. Programmers there would store programs on punched tape and leave it in a desk drawer. Others were en
by donarb 9y ago
I recall the story about Bill Gates at Harvard in the 70's. Programmers there would store programs on punched tape and leave it in a desk drawer. Others were encouraged to use and modify the code and share their changes. Gates balked at that idea. Surely an example of open source before it was formally named.
- cmsj 9y agoCorrect. Open Source as an informal concept is how almost all software used to work. It was folk like Bill Gates who saw an opportunity to make money by making it proprietary. Also, some of the formal concepts are more than 20 years old - e.g. Free Software: the precursors of GPL-style copyleft go back to the mid-late 1980s (GPL v1 was published 29 years ago this month).
- acqq 9y agoFor example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists