First FOSS OS?
Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:23 UTC (Thu) by
landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to:
First FOSS OS? by NigelK
Parent article:
The road to freedom in the embedded world
> The point is that if that FSF hadn't existed, if RMS didn't write GCC,
> someone else's C compiler would have taken its place as the compiler of
> choice simply because other people were writing those sorts of thing at
> the time anyway. The Public Domain scene was *massive* for a time
> during the 80's and early 90's before Internet access became more
> widespread.
Seconded.
Anybody remember Jim Butterfield? My commodore 64 came bundled with a
bonus disk of software, about half of which was public domain stuff he'd
written. Here's an interview with him that predates the founding of the
FSF by a year, where he talks about writing public domain software and
author's rights to do what they like with their programs:
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/jim_butterfield_co...
Rob
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