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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. |