[emilsedgh]

The entire open source movement is a disproof of stallman's position from that period.

Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement.

He has repeatedly claimed that companies won't contribute to open source, and so you have to force them to with the GNU license, and yet history has disproven this one.

You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important software projects in the world (if not the most important one) uses GPL and the Linus himself knows that as a direct result of using GPL, right?

Of course, the bazaar model makes Open Source very attractive to companies and many do open source their work. However, the bazaar model happened and the companies where enlightened about it because Free Software Movement happened. Bazaar model was a consequence to that.

[MCRed]

> Open Source movement did not happen in vacuum. It was a direct followup to 'Free Software' movement.

I was there, buddy.

The Open Source movement existed before GNU. The homebrew computer club and magazines and BBSes of the day all involved people sharing their source code with each other without a license in most cases, or explicitly in the public domain. The FSF GNU license was a reaction to this, to try and shut it down.

How old were you in the 1976-1986 period? Were you there?

The whole "FSF created open source!" is post-hoc ergo propter-hoc rationalization to grandstand and justify his campaign.

> You do know that the Linux Kernel, among the most important software projects in the world

Oh, no, I've never heard of Linux. Do tell!

Seriously, I was there. I was doing open source between GNU even existed. It was how things started out-- with hobbyists sharing code.

[kragen]

I was there too, and what you're saying is false almost from beginning to end, with only a few tidbits of truth mixed in to make it plausible.

Yes, of course lots of people were sharing their code before GNU. I mean, that's why SHARE was founded, and why it was called SHARE, back in 1955. The novelty was the proprietary software movement, with moves like IBM ceasing to ship source code, Micro-Soft claiming a copyright on their BASIC implementation, and James Gosling implicitly threatening to sue Stallman for using code from Gosmacs ("the great Emacs copyright debate"), which he'd previously shared without any explicit license.

That's what the FSF was a reaction to and an attempt to shut down — not people sharing software without a license, but the attempts of pirates like Gosling and Gates to privatize it. Richard totally deserves credit for starting a movement to preserve what had previously just been the normal way that people did things, once it came under attack.

But none of this was "Open Source", which is a marketing term for free software that Chris Peterson suggested at a meeting on February 3, 1998. (I wasn't there, but I know a bunch of people who were.) In a non-public but widely Cced email within the next few days, Eric Raymond tried to recruit all the prominent free software developers to the new campaign; Stallman and Deutsch, as I recall, refused in fairly strong terms.

[maxerickson]

BSD doesn't owe any of its origination to GNU, and it is impossible to say what it would look like if GNU never happened.

(The point being, capital letter Open Source as a movement owes something to Free Software, the notion of sharing liberally licensed source code does not)

[kragen]

Actually, Keith Bostic has gone on record saying that the reason he started trying to strip out the AT&T bits from the BSD kernel was because he was inspired by GNU, and wanted to see if the BSD kernel could work as a kernel for GNU. Maybe in Open Sources, I don't remember.

[maxerickson]

I wrote the comment thinking that the BSD releases in the early 1980s had been released under the 'BSD License', I even did some amount of checking (I can't remember what evidence in particular made me decide to post). I see from looking more carefully this time around that the ~1980 license from Berkeley was not the same thing as the later one.

[kragen]

Well, it's also true that the liberalization of the later versions of the BSD license (removing the advertising clause) was at least in part a result of FSF pressure. But that wasn’t what I meant. I had thought that the early BSD releases were under the four-clause BSD license — but you needed the AT&T Unix source code to compile them.

However, this turns out not to be the whole story at all. I tried rooting around in http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD without any success at finding a 4BSD license. http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck.htm... has Kirk McKusick’s recollection of the history of the licensing; up to at least 4.3BSD-Tahoe in 1988 it’s talking about “site licenses” rather than free-software licenses, and all the recipients needed AT&T licenses as well. It wasn't until the NET-1 release ("the networking tape") in 1989 that what we know as the BSD license existed, and it wasn’t until the NET-2 tapes in 1991 — largely impelled by Bostic — that there was anything like a complete free BSD OS.

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html talks about how Bostic credits Stallman with inspiring him to care about software freedom.

[maxerickson]

I opened the .tap here in a text editor yesterday, it mentions executing a license and returning it to Berkeley:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/Install%20tapes/...

(I wasn't super careful to determine that the language there applied to the whole distribution, but it seems fairly likely)

The argument I was trying to make would have survived a 4 clause BSD license in 1980; I wasn't saying that BSD and derivatives as they exist owe nothing to GNU, I (thought I) was pointing out that people were sharing a sophisticated base system under a liberal license prior to GNU. Starting from there and proceeding without GNU it's of course hard to say where things would have ended up, would they have further liberalized the license, would they have filled in the rest of the system, who knows? They certainly might have.

I do think there are economic forces that encourage some sort of open model for software that is necessary and reasonable well understood/explored, but it's hard to examine a notion like that without a history machine.

[kragen]

Right, and it turns out that they were sharing a sophisticated base system; it was just that the licensing, once people started applying copyright to software at all, didn't protect the users very well.

And, yes, clearly information sharing is very good for software — as I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, that’s what SHARE was founded for in 1955 — but it’s also good for chemistry, and yet it took many centuries before we got Priestley and the Invisible College instead of alchemists writing notes in code so their apprentices couldn’t steal them.