I'm just using piracy here to illustrate how your take is not founded in reality. You said: >Before we had open source, we released software as public domain.

I'm just using piracy here to illustrate how your take is not founded in reality. You said: >Before we had open source, we released software as public domain. The spirit existed before the trademark phrase You're claiming that the shareware community was a thing, and is somehow the same, or a natural predecessor to the open source community, and that the software piracy community is something completely different and unrelated. I think this claim is just you imposing a political slant on something much more ambiguous. Arguably the BBS community as a whole was strongly pro-piracy and pro-shareware, and generally indifferent, except for small sections, to things like sharing source code.