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Crazy hippies and evil corporations: Open source in the commercial world
- dalke 11y ago> In 1998, a group of free software supporters decided to rebrand the movement, freeing it from the moral views and highlighting the benefits that working together has for business. That’s when the term open source was born and it became an important first step in making the two polar opposites see how could they work together. That's a revisionist view, or perhaps just a simplification that happens to discard examples that end up weakening the argument. We already by the early 1990s had "first steps" where free software and corporate, for-profit companies work together. Cygnus Solutions with GNU support, Lucid Inc. with Lucid Emacs, and NeXT with Objective C are companies who in ~1990 were shipping free software products. With NeXT, that includes the 'polar opposites' of Jobs and Stallman. (And you'll note that Jobs was an actual hippie.) This essay also views "Companies that use and modify community projects and never give back" as "evil". This view, while not uncommon, is contrary to software freedom. Quoting from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html : "You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play." Companies which "never give back" are not evil nor even pushing the edge. They are doing exactly what the free software movement says they can do.