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by alangibson 2055 days ago
I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it.

Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.
2 comments
falcolas 2055 days ago
It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

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autarch 2055 days ago
The term "free software" predates "open source" by many years. Stallman started work on free software (the movement and the code) many, many years before Eric S Raymond coined the term "open source".
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alangibson 2055 days ago
It's about the sharing of code, whatever label you put on it. Terminology usually lags behind practice.
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autarch 2055 days ago
The terms "free software" and "open source" were created very deliberately to express different values. The conflict between those values has been the source of a lot of contention in the past. Nowadays there's less of that, probably because as the industry grows, the proportion of developers who are old enough to remember this stuff is going down.
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carapace 2055 days ago
No, you could always share your code, "Open" source adds nothing to that.

"Free" software is about preventing technology lock-in. As in "I'll share with you but only if you agree to share with me."

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