[pullmn]

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.

[stonesweep]

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.

[pullmn]

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.