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As the world's first home computers appeared in 1975, Bill Gates -- then 20 years old -- screamed that "Most of you steal your software..." (Gates had coded the operating system for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff -- only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club.) Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."
Freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And the earliest open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. (This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.)
Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how 30 years later, that movement finally won over Steve Jobs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:19PM (12 children)
With your software copyrighted, all you need is a PC and an idea. You can make a lot of money. With "copy left" you have to build a hardware business, or some other business that's served by software slaves. The barrier to entry is a lot steeper. So of course when you're a suit presiding over a multi-$billion enterprise, you eventually come around. Gates knows when to pull up the draw bridge.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:28PM (2 children)
" With "copy left" you have to build a hardware business"
Bullshit.
No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure
is what the world runs on now.
Eventually, the OS that Cutler built will rot from AI slop, but no one will care
because no value can be made from operating systems infrastructure.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 04, @05:10PM (1 child)
No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure
It's rare but there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up, like ST-DOS [sininenankka.dy.fi] with its lEEt/OS GUI [sininenankka.dy.fi]. That's a one-man team.
Then there are bigger projects like Haiku OS [haiku-os.org]. Even old, formerly moribund projects like Hurd are seeing a revival. Those are likely caused by people seeing the writing on the wall for Linux. It has not seen culling and refactoring like the kernels for some of the BSDs have. The result is that it gets bigger and bigger with more cruft and more legacy code.
However, while the kernel is one thing, coming up with a new user space is a whole different matter. In that regards there is basically only a choice between GNU and the BSDs.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @08:16PM
"there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up"
Toys.
Apple failed in the 90s writing a modern operating system because doing all the grunt work
is hard, and there isn't enough payback for even their NIH.
(Score: 4, Touché) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 04, @05:45PM (6 children)
And a metric crapton of lawyers. And lobbyists and your own enforcement squad [cnet.com], probably.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Thursday February 05, @12:09AM (5 children)
Not necessarily. If it's a simple enough idea for one or two people to develop, and priced low enough, it can be hard for anybody to compete with that. There's still plenty of software that could be written where you could get a million or two million people to give you a couple bucks. There's like 8bn people in the world, so that's a fraction of a percent of the world population and people in most parts of the world have $1 or $2 if they've got something to run the program on if it's sufficiently useful.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @04:40AM (4 children)
The main thing that prevents the development of free software that you can pay a dollar for a copy of, is payment systems.
It is very inconvenient, with many restrictions and lots of proprietary software in the way of paying small amounts to others.
A real free software developer isn't going to require running proprietary software to get a copy of free software is he?
Cryptocurrencies solve some of the problems, but governments have made it hard to get cryptocurrencies without a credit card and doxing yourself to some ??? business.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday February 06, @03:50AM (3 children)
This is word salad nonsense. If it's free, payment is a non-issue. If it's paid for, I see a ton of Android apps for hardly any money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Friday February 06, @05:19AM (2 children)
Free means freedom.
You can construct "free of charge", but nothing is ever really without charge.
While too many have fallen for marketing that has "free" plastered over it, for things that aren't gratis, that take your freedom - that's their problem, not mine.
Free software is not necessarily gratis - anyone can choose to only give a copy of free software to someone else if payment is made (but almost nobody does that anymore, as it only takes a tiny amount of power and a some internet packets to send someone a copy of software).
Every Android cr...app on the google played store is proprietary software, whether it's gratis or costs money (and even if it has source code available under a free license, I don't think developers are even allowed to publish anything without "linking" it with proprietary google libraries, which makes the software proprietary).
The idea of such "stores" is that the suckers only need to carry out the inconvenience of setting up an account and payment methods once, allowing for many micro-transactions of $1-5 (with a fat 30% fee on each), actioned by merely clicking a button (even the biggest sucker will only pay $1 a handful of times and then stop, if an account needs to be setup and payment details entered every time).
F-droid isn't much better (even though the publication policy is that requiring money isn't allowed), as everything is compiled/assembled against a proprietary google SDK (that does not correspond to published claimed source code of the SDK), thus it can't be said that anything from F-droid is free software.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday February 07, @04:49PM (1 child)
This is bs nonsense, it's not something that's sustainable as there's a bunch of stuff like documentation and bug fixes to boring things that only really get fixed if people are paying.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Sunday February 08, @09:18AM
Counterpoint; https://www.gnu.org/software/ [gnu.org]
Most GNU packages are not developed in exchange for money and the documentation is very extensive; https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html [gnu.org]
Not all GNU packages were exciting to write - the GNU assembler (GAS) wasn't exciting, but it needed to be written (now part of binutils), same as GNU tar.
Boring things get fixed as part of community goodwill - if each developer fixes only one boring thing per 100 exciting things, then >9000 boring things end up getting fixed.
Despite all the constant attempts to destroy GNU, it's sustainable.
Proprietary software companies generally do not care about fixing anything unless it means losing their unjust power over at least half of the suckers (which can occur if the suckers stop using the software and stop paying due to total unusability of the software - note that all proprietary programs are quite unusable if you think about how those need to be operated in a purely practical sense) - therefore, things that are boring see even less fixes (from personal experience, these companies will refuse to fix even the most severe of bugs - as why would they bother when they have the business by the balls?).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @11:01PM
On the contrary, copyright is center of the "copy left". Also, software like GPL started for 1 purpose -- stop re-inventing the wheel. You are paid to alter software and everyone benefits, instead of reinventing and rewriting same software over and over again as was very common in the past. Today, many software companies that sell certifications and support contracts benefit hugely from this too. We are talking many tens of billions if not hundreds of billions are spend every year on "copy left" or otherwise freedom software support contracts. Heck, the company I work for makes almost 10 digits in sales alone. And we sell no hardware or SaaS or whatever and no lock-in ecosystem either. Just pure certification and support play.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Bentonite on Thursday February 05, @04:33AM
Copyleft licenses like the GPLv2-or-later and GPLv3-or-later, do not prevent legitimate business activities with software.
Although now selling copies of software is now entirely redundant, as anyone with a computer can make unlimited copies, there are a few business that sell copies of software as free software under various GNU license.
The money is now in custom software and support - most software businesses do carry out such legitimate business (you do make a good profit, but you actually have to work for it).
Microsoft has been a parasite that has utilized governmental restrictions to the fullest extend from the very start (very few parasites can exist at the same time and all of them try to wipe out each other), but even they realized that their joke of an OS couldn't compete practically with GNU/Linux and it would be over as soon as their layers and layers of proprietary sabotage were finally completely dismantled.