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by pwang 5185 days ago
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.)
2 comments
pessimizer 5185 days ago
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."

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astrodust 5184 days ago
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.

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