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by znpy 998 days ago
What you’re saying doesn’t make sense at all.

If that was true that would have been just some marketing campaign.

There would have been no need to divert the attention from the free software foundation.

1 comments

Yes, basically a marketing campaign. Wikipedia [0] says (in part): "Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring free software principles and benefits to the commercial-software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of the sharing of source code."

In other words, we had a thing that would benefit everyone in many ways, but some people didn't like the marketing message of "users deserve these rights!" so a complementary marketing message of "cheaper and higher-quality software through collaboration!" was needed to reach that group.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...