[weego]

I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.

The participation in it part is newer, they were initially very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental to my career')

[benreesman]

The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're so, I don't know, intimate or something. They're freely available for anyone to read, but community members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're wire-tapping someone's living room.

I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling personally slighted was the reason he went on the crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably comfortable paintjob.

He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't really want him around either but were getting clobbered on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of history until Linus comes along right?

[kanetw]

Yeah, I agree. I distinctly remember open source becoming more corporate as the years got by, and corporate becoming more open source aligned.