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Proprietary printer drivers directly contributed to the open source revolution. Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software developme
by orangepurple 3y ago
Proprietary printer drivers directly contributed to the open source revolution.
Richard Stallman started his journey of free and open source software development because he got triggered by proprietary drivers used by his laser printer
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
- extraduder_ire 3y agoNot just his, it was shared between people on the time-sharing system in the MIT AI lab. The change he wanted to make, that he'd made to the prior printer, was to shoot off a message to anyone with jobs in the print queue when the printer jammed because that was the quickest way to get it fixed. I'm amazed xerox didn't think of this usecase themselves, unless they expected the printer to be attended all the time. In hindsight, it's good that they didn't.