Linked by David Adams on Mon 16th Aug 2004 17:44 UTC
I read something in one of the comments for an OSNews posting a couple weeks ago that sent me thinking. It wasn't an original or profound thought. In fact, it's a rather commonly-held opinion that happens to be quite misguided. It's an opinion summed up by the "open source = communist" meme that gets thrown around in thousands of flamewars all over the internet. In this essay, I will explore why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
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Yeah, now that it's hip and groovy. Around the time GCC was written it was common practice to take BSD code and make a proprietory fork. Look at the UNIX history tree.
The causal link between GPL vs BSD and people being exposed to free software (note, there was no freakin' "open source") is pretty blatant, if you asked for the GCC source code you got the entire GNU collection.