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I became an AGPL3 fan after reading many papers from the 50s->70s, before the rise of open source & the Unix sharing habits. I believe its a crying shame that
by pnathan 14y ago
I became an AGPL3 fan after reading many papers from the 50s->70s, before the rise of open source & the Unix sharing habits. I believe its a crying shame that all those wonderful tools and systems that I read about disappeared into the void and got hidden by closed-source approaches to development and licensing. I am fully aware that this limits certain avenues of commercialization, and I am fully OK with that. I believe that an AGPL3 world is a better world for computer science and technology.
From my perspective as an engineer in the enterprise, we value functionality very highly; if you sell us a GPL3-based hardware solution, we care that it works. We're not going to copy and resell it. We have our own products to care about and do excellent things with.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoIMO, they disappeared exactly because they embraced the ideals you love. Of course people aren't going to work on extending and polishing these systems if they can't get paid to (at least not at the same magnitude as for the closed solutions). At least, that is what history seems to indicate so far, except in a relatively limited space where companies have both the technical expertise to modify the source AND the economic incentive to avoid paying for closed licenses. Although that is not the situation this guy finds himself in. He seems to just be confused.
- pnathan 14y agoI might be wrong, but I don't think Honeywell, Burroughs, DEC, IBM (and the other vendors) used the open source (as we think of it today) model. edit: As a matter of fact, part of why Unix was able to spread was the AT&T restrictions forcing it to be shared.