To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
GPL? come on ... have you ever heard of BSD? do you even know the history of IT?
PDPs used by the academics was there BEFORE personal computing era. I'm talking about this code being shared freely between various academic places. Don't tell me you didn't know that. Do you really think it's all about money? do you think it was all pushed there only for money? read about Thompson and Ritchie. You'll see it was actually against mainstream first. It was for fun, joy, out of curiosity, to build something news, not for money at all. It is called research. Then it's eventually pushed to the folks from various corporations. At least that's how it worked then. Now it may be all about money, unfortunately. That's probobly why we have so much crap out there.
@werecatf - you see, that was not being said literally, but it's the meaning you can read out of people's comments. "Get over it, it's normal, accept it, you don't have any choice anyway. Shut up and stop whining".
BSD doesn't try to redefine the word freedom. They state what you are free to do with the license and that is the end of it. It's the GPL that capitalizes and redefines freedom in a creepy newspeak fashion.
Researchers share and hide their work depending on the situation, don't act like academia is one big hippie share fest.
No you tried perpetrating a common GPL myth that the software world was some open source utopia before the ebil proprietary companies showed up.
Money and proprietary software are not mutually exclusive. Anyways Thomson and Ritchie worked for Bell labs which was funded by AT&T. It wasn't an open source project so I'm not sure where you are going with this.
I think you might have bought into a few myths from the the cult of the GPL. That's understandable given how widely accepted they are on places like Slashdot.





Member since:
2012-06-22
That's not true, IBM was selling proprietary software from the beginning. Please don't try to push that GPL revisionist history here.
Disregarding the GPL newspeak definition of "freedom" there is a major upside to crapware which is that is lowers the entry price of computers. Have OEMs gone to far? Yes but I'm fine with non-invasive crapware like installed programs that don't run in the background.
That is a unrealistic solution that doesn't take into account the billions of dollars worth of proprietary software for which there is no free alternative.