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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: 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.