Source available.

Source available.

Posted Feb 26, 2007 18:43 UTC (Mon) by MBR (guest, #43632)
In reply to: Source available. by AJWM
Parent article: How an Accident of Hardware Design Encouraged Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Very specifically, what helped stimulate the Free Software movement (which was rebranded the "Open Source" movement in the late 1990s) was Richard Stallman's frustration with the way corporations were trying to lock up everything in sight. In the late 1970s, he used to rant to me and anyone else who'd listen, about how "they're taking away our freedom to program." According to "Free as in Freedom," Sam Williams' biography of Stallman, one of the major culprits was Xerox. Unlike most of us programmers who were frustrated with how corporations were making it impossible for us to share our code, Stallman had the realization that he could stop this by distributing useful code under a license that required recipients of the code to behave the way programmers had been used to behaving throughout the 1970s.

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