[pessimizer]

Because slaves would have magicked out of slavery due to the passage of time? I'm not sure why you would laugh in their face rather than suggest alternative scenarios where other processes might have eliminated slavery if Lincoln hadn't happened.

I'm not smart enough to understand your comment. Are you saying that free software would have inevitably come to exist with or without Stallman? If you are, I'd say the burden of proof is on you.

[pwang]

Um, free software was the way of the world before Bill Gates popularized the selling of the stuff.

Stallman rose to the occasion as the defender of the "old way". He did not "invent" free software, whatever that means. (He did invent the Copyleft license, but there are many other licenses of free software besides Copyleft.)

[pessimizer]

Might have been better for me to say "a free ecosystem of legally usable source code comparable to the one a large part of the industry depends on today."

Or maybe I should have just capitalized "free."

[astrodust]

Free software in the domain of personal computers, which at the time were still hand assembled and didn't even have a functioning display, was the only way anyone knew how to do it until Bill Gates wanted money for BASIC.

IBM, of course, had been charging money for software for decades prior to that.

[jongraehl]

Given that someone already wrote something (scratching their own itch, hoped to make money but gave up, altruism), they may decide to jump from low adoption+recognition to potential ubiquity by releasing the software free for others to exploit. On the basis of individual incentive alone, this is inevitable.

[tedunangst]

I'll just mention that the MIT license is not the GPL and leave it at that. (yes, that's proof enough for me.)