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by zvr 1914 days ago
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.
2 comments
p_l 1913 days ago
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.
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twic 1914 days ago
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.
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