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Thanks for the edits. I really wrote the whole thing off the top of my head, so some parts weren't completely accurate.

You are right, although a bit pedantic. I was describing the process that took place, which was commerce taking over what had before that been almost entirely academic.



The thing is, by the 80s, UNIX geeks were already a breed apart. I lumped them in with the academic crowd there which isn't accurate. The point I was trying to make is that while the FSF were approaching businesses and institutions, they were pretty much getting laughed out the of the building. But you are right, GNU did have a following, especially emacs which was the de-facto coding tool on unix environments for a very long time.



IMHO, this is a cop-out. HURD itself has been in development for almost 20 years now with no usable version in sight, and it was the second try for a GNU kernel. While a micro-kernel is more difficult then a monolithic one, it isnt THAT much more difficult.



If read all the CatB stuff (I forget exactly which essay he talks about it), ESR says that the open source methodology was started in linux, and others who used it successfully were unconsciously copying things that Linus did. What happened with CatB is that it moved from the unconscious to the conscious. If you really want me to find the exact quote I will, but I am basing that statement on what he wrote.



KDE calls itself Free NOW, but that is because of all the Qt drama when it started. GNOME was specifically started as a Free alternative to KDE, and had strong times to GNU. And of course GNU is free, it is the OS made by the FSF. What I am referring to is what ESR said when he was describing the whole birth of Mozilla thing. He said a few weeks after the term Open Source hit the wild, so web searching showed far more adoption then he had anticipated. I was into mucking with Apples back then, so I can't say from personal experience.



Now there's some egg on my face ;-) Like I said, I wrote that off the top of my head, and it has been a real long time since I was reading through the FSF materials.



Well, quite honestly, most people don't care about either, and use linux because it is a cool way to "stick it to the man", and is free as in beer. These people are more or less leeches, but they make up a nice percentage of the user base. Typically, when someone around me is using Free and Open interchangeably, I try to briefly describe the difference between philosophy and methodology. The people I run into lean more towards the practical, but it could be where I live and who I talk to.



You see, I didn't even know that.

I will point out though that while they may say they support the FSF, they do not follow their principals. Most of those companies do not completely Free all their assets, which is what the FSF says is right. Most of what you listed release source code where it makes sense, and keep the "crown jewels" closed, as ESR describes in The Magic Cauldron. That and while I have been in business meetings where people are discussing open source, the only context I have ever heard FSF morality preached to me is in forums like these (or LUGs, which is sort of the same thing)



It amounts to the same thing, a corruption of the word Freedom. Freedom for a guy to hack on a program in his basement is not the same thing as the charter of human rights. It doesn't even remotely come close.

There is a huge difference for a government to say "we demand open formats and protocols for our infrastructure so we will not be reliant on a single business" to saying all source code not given away is wrong. Free software works for stuff like transport protocols or server software, but it falls apart for real commercial applications. The vast majority of advancements in digital image creation and manipulation have been done by adobe, which would simply not exist in a Free Software world. Same thing with sound, DAWs would be at an even lower level then they are in Linux if it weren't for proprietary software. Games would be at the zork level.

What I am saying is that when you bring morality into what is essentially a discussion about practical issues, you end up painting everything black or white. Like it or not, corporate innovation deals with things that academic innovation would never really consider a priority, and by removing commercial incentive, you are basically killing the software industry. And while there is a difference between commercial and free, removing any ability for a company to protect their investment in R&D makes it amount to virtually the same thing. The only way for it to be worthwhile is for software to be used to sell something else, which still means there is no software industry.