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License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyo
by whoitwas 2y ago
License does matter. Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist. A better analogy would be if roads and utility cables were built as open source, everyone used them for free, then they were acquired by giant companies who charge for their use.
- DeathArrow 2y agoHow is software an utility?
- whoitwas 2y agoanalogy: A similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.
- DeathArrow 2y agoWhat is the working analogy here? Where is the similarity?
- fungiblecog 2y agoThe rest of us understood it
- pjmlp 2y agoIt would exist as I knew it until 2000's, and hence why I see a parallel where current non-copyleft adoption has taken us back to.
- whoitwas 2y agoThat's the point. It wouldn't exist. It's not possible without research and OSS. You can't write off the entire foundation of CS before a date. Well you can, but it's ignoring history.
- pjmlp 2y agoThere was plenty of research at my university without OSS.
- ekianjo 2y agoThe whole internet is running mostly on OSS so not really
- pjmlp 2y agoThe Internet used plenty of closed source UNIX back then, and did just fine.
- anthk 2y agoEven Microsoft used PDP10's back in the day.
- pjmlp 2y agoAnd, since when was Xenix open source?
- ThrowawayR2 2y ago> "Without OSS, computing as we know it doesn't exist." The rise of the Internet and the dot-com boom happened largely without OSS, on proprietary UNIXes, proprietary web server engines, and proprietary database engines. FAANG and other high tech businesses can easily afford very expensive servers and datacenters to house them thanks to the very very fat profit margins. They can also easily afford the cost of an OS license and other software tools.
- whoitwas 2y agoThis is nonsense. Consumer workstations were proprietary. The internet was made by government grants and us.
- wrs 2y agoNot sure who “us” is meant to be, but the first Internet boom (1995-2000) used a whole lot of Solaris, Windows, and Cisco. Of course there was plenty of OSS too, but Linux servers, or Intel servers, weren’t the standard. I remember visiting early Hotmail and their sharded “capital unit” was a great big Sun storage server and a bunch of Intel desktop towers running BSD. The latter was considered rather wild at the time. Last I checked, some eBay URLs still had “ebayISAPI.dll” in them, which is a remnant of that period.