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I have to say I find it hard to follow your argument. How can the forces be stronger than ever if the opposition was defeated and wiped out? According to lore,

I have to say I find it hard to follow your argument. How can the forces be stronger than ever if the opposition was defeated and wiped out? According to lore, Stallman started the movement due to a closed-source appliance (a printer) he used and which he wanted to improve. Closed devices continued to be and are still the norm, so I don't see how the opposition was defeated, let alone wiped out.

tboyd47 6y ago
Corporate influence stronger than ever outside of the limited domain of operating systems for mainframe computers at universities. The opposition that was wiped out was closed-source, proprietary operating systems for the PDP-11. It may seem an insignificant footnote to us, but if we look at everything built on Unix -- Mac OS, Linux, practically the entire internet -- the battle was universe shaping for computing. Despite the huge influence, the moral and legal arguments made by free software proponents fall on deaf ears in 2020. My view is that those arguments don't have the same meaning outside of the specific context they arose in. Stipulating that people who extend your open source software make their extensions open source is meaningless in the context of 10,000,000 JS libraries that take a developer a few weeks to create, all are delivered in plaintext anyway, and all intended to run on Google Chrome or Safari. It's more meaningful in the context of an operating system designed to run on 100s of computers and interface with 1,000s of peripherals, most of which are not known to the OS developer, which the OS developer wouldn't even have access to if they knew about it, and would take said developer months or years to support if they did have access to it. The GPL and other legal tools were developed for that context, and they succeeded to a revolutionary degree in that and to evaluate them in a different context is to miss the forest for the trees. One of the best accounts of the movement I've read is "Open Sources." Highly recommend it!

tboyd47 6y ago

Corporate influence stronger than ever outside of the limited domain of operating systems for mainframe computers at universities. The opposition that was wiped out was closed-source, proprietary operating systems for the PDP-11. It may seem an insignificant footnote to us, but if we look at everything built on Unix -- Mac OS, Linux, practically the entire internet -- the battle was universe shaping for computing. Despite the huge influence, the moral and legal arguments made by free software proponents fall on deaf ears in 2020. My view is that those arguments don't have the same meaning outside of the specific context they arose in. Stipulating that people who extend your open source software make their extensions open source is meaningless in the context of 10,000,000 JS libraries that take a developer a few weeks to create, all are delivered in plaintext anyway, and all intended to run on Google Chrome or Safari. It's more meaningful in the context of an operating system designed to run on 100s of computers and interface with 1,000s of peripherals, most of which are not known to the OS developer, which the OS developer wouldn't even have access to if they knew about it, and would take said developer months or years to support if they did have access to it. The GPL and other legal tools were developed for that context, and they succeeded to a revolutionary degree in that and to evaluate them in a different context is to miss the forest for the trees. One of the best accounts of the movement I've read is "Open Sources." Highly recommend it!