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This seems to be an article about the origin of the term "open source" and not about what the world was like before open source. I also found it funny that Lin
by jgh 9y ago
This seems to be an article about the origin of the term "open source" and not about what the world was like before open source. I also found it funny that Linus' original response to the question was "I honestly don't remember".
- jordigh 9y agoAn amazing amount of people forget what this was like and think that we've always had "open source", whatever it was called. Many will vehemently argue against the OSI definition of open source, despite them coining the term, because they're very convinced that everyone knew what open source was in 1995 and everyone used it since at least 1970. It's important to remember this history. In a way, free software (or open source) was the only way to originally do software. You bought a machine, and the manufacturer would just give you the source code, because how could you operate the machine otherwise? People didn't even think software was copyrightable at first. Whenever you have old people like rms mourning about the current state of software, that's because they remember what it was like when all software was free. This happened, and remembering the origins of the term "open source" is a way to memorialise that. http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgotten-about-open-source/ http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/5-things-we-have-forgot...