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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: 2) by aafcac on Saturday February 07 2026, @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 2026, @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?).