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by pullmn 1920 days ago
Do you include piracy in this?

As I remember it the 'community' was completely divided for most of its existence between those who held that the spirit meant writing your own software and sharing that of others who had agreed to do so, and a much larger group who believed that the spirit consisted of sharing anything you wanted, including plenty of closed and for-pay commercial software.
1 comments
stonesweep 1920 days ago
> Do you include piracy in this?

No I do not (I don't deny it was/is a thing), as I feel that was a different community (and it still exists today) - yes, the same technology was used but no, they were not/are not the same community. These are two distinct communities sharing common technology (just like Linux ISOs and pirated software are both distributed over BitTorrent today - the technology has changed but both groups still share it's use). I knew/know people from both communities, they're just two different groups of people who might happen to end up at a party together, that's about it really. I personally don't condone piracy, but then again I've been living inside Linux for 20 years so I don't really encounter it these days.

Me personally, I ran a BBS under OS/2 and was part of Fidonet (I actually roomed in college years with the local Fidonet hub guy), wrote my own widgets in TurboPascal and distributed the binaries and source without any licenses (if we even had any at the time), some of it can still be found in those old CD collections that folks used to sell. I lost my own source code over the years and was able to recover some of it out of those archives. :) (my career steered away from programming into systems engineering, not a coder by trade)

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pullmn 1920 days ago
Well, I think a lot of the people who were doing piracy would argue that they embodied the spirit of the community, and the anti-pirates were just a small minority who had a particular approach. So I don't think it's possible for you speaking alone to say what was or wasn't the spirit or the community.
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stonesweep 1920 days ago
We're both talking about the open source community, right? This was the Parent comment I replied to and directly quoted, and I'm not seeing why you're intent on focusing on something I'm not talking about. You seem to have an axe to grind here on this specific topic of piracy, not open source.
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pullmn 1920 days ago
I'm just using piracy here to illustrate how your take is not founded in reality.

You said:

>Before we had open source, we released software as public domain. The spirit existed before the trademark phrase

You're claiming that the shareware community was a thing, and is somehow the same, or a natural predecessor to the open source community, and that the software piracy community is something completely different and unrelated.

I think this claim is just you imposing a political slant on something much more ambiguous. Arguably the BBS community as a whole was strongly pro-piracy and pro-shareware, and generally indifferent, except for small sections, to things like sharing source code.

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