[Doctor_Fegg]

> Richard Stallman single-handedly created the free software movement

The "Free Software" movement (cap F, cap S), yes.

> and he's the reason we all have jobs

No.

There was a sizeable movement for public domain software before Stallman. Stallman brought along a particular ideology and one which resonated with a lot of people, as well as coding a bunch of software himself. But it is an incredible reach to say that, without Stallman, there wouldn't have been the option to "spin up a server for free and compile code without paying a license". How do you know that?

I ran a "public domain library" back in the 8-bit days, as did many others. It was code you could distribute freely, and where you could play around and build upon the source. You could argue that Stallman's Free Software was another descendant of the early '80s public domain software culture, but you cannot presume that public domain software would have withered and died without Stallman. I think it's vanishingly unlikely, in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc... is worth reading.

[Taniwha]

Yup, long before I ever heard of Stallman we were passing around mag tapes full of software to share - people brought stuff to conferences and conference tapes were a thing

[sam_lowry_]

This is called pirating, now. I think Stallman contributed a lot to keep the sharing economy legal.

[Taniwha]

No it's not, sharing the source code of stuff you create yourself with others is not 'pirating', it basn't then and it isn't now (we're talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape here)

[ganafagol]

Creating and advocating for a legal framework elevates this to a different level. There is a difference between passing floppy discs to your buddies and software that whole industries are based on. It needs a solid legal foundation. And a philosophocal framework too, i it's supposed to survive.

And that's what we should credit rms for.

[zvr]

You are correct if you're only talking about software created by _yourself_. However, most of the software I got on 9-track tapes were collective works, with the usual case being that the copyright owner was the employer of the people who actually wrote the software.

[zvr]

It might be the case that Open Source would have been created without RMS.

However, you can't deny that Copyleft (the legal hack that guarantees that source code will stay open) was his invention. I am not aware of anyone else thinking this way in the timeframe he first put his idea in public.

[p_l]

One can even say that open source organizations started 30 years before RMS started FSF in wake of losing a copyright trial. SHARE is, after all, from 1955, 16 years before a certain first year Harvard physics student took a job at MIT AI Lab and was told to work on text editor, because that's what they are paying him for.

[twic]

This is true, but irrelevant. There is plenty of non-copyleft software that is thriving. FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, X, Rails, you name it. None of them have succumbed to the fates against which GPL proponents advertise their license as the only defence.