3 ms·
This should be retitled "next big waves in profitability": the downturn period ("in the early-to-mid 1980s") they mention has brought us TeX in 1983 that revolu
by necovek 4y ago
This should be retitled "next big waves in profitability": the downturn period ("in the early-to-mid 1980s") they mention has brought us TeX in 1983 that revolutionised typesetting soon after, especially math typesetting; start of the free software movement and a programmable editor environment like Emacs; and countless others, though these spring to my mind right off the bat.
Notably, none of them led to VCs getting involved because these were published as free software.
But judge them as not innovative or revolutionary at your own peril.
- breck 4y agoYou're wrong. TeX had no impact and everyone nowadays in science makes PDFs first and then compiles to TeX only for legacy reasons. Similarly, the public domain WWW was a good idea but really just cloned AOL.com and I expect AOL to make a comeback soon. The public domain SQLite has had a good run but Oracle now has MySQL and so I expect them to start taking good market share. And I used to work at Microsoft and they had a non-public domain VCS called SourceDepo (sd) that will soon give git a real run for its money.
- necovek 4y agoMy apologies, you are completely right. But I am not sure what VCS stands for? Venture Capitalist Sourcecode?
- breck 4y ago> Venture Capitalist Sourcecode That sounds right. Apparently they've innovated a new wave and soon I won't have to save my files as "C://Dropbox/SourceCode(2).mathematica" anymore.