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a minor quibblea minor quibblePosted Dec 10, 2008 18:23 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: Interview: Vernor Vinge The term "shareware" was first used in 1983, the same year RMS wrote "Why I must write GNU" (although according to this history the first known programmer to use the "pay me if you like it" concept did so in 1981). Prof. Vinge is technically correct that the GNU project formally started a couple of years later (RMS was flying solo in 1983, doing GNU Emacs by himself), but the two ideas originated at about the same time.
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a minor quibble (squared) Posted Dec 10, 2008 19:54 UTC (Wed) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]
The informal concept of "free software" predates the formal movement by RMS. Early "applications" software was published in printed form without any expectation that it was covered by any license or copyrights. It was the fruits of, and part of an iterative process of the research.
Quite a bit of early software created by end-users was printed in the nascent community newsletters in an era that pre-dated e-mail, faxes, and far, far pre-dated "the web." Other bits of it were "published" over UUCP/Netnews (both of which were early examples of free software).
Shareware emerged primarily from PCs (IBM compatible microcomputers) and Macs. These were machines which made binary distribution of software feasible. This meant large numbers of "sites" or "units" with relatively uniform OS (run-time environments). Shareware made more sense in a world where you had this large potential customer base, and where those end user machines usually didn't include a compiler and tool chain. (Not only was the source code unnecessary for that deployment, it was useless to most of its potential user base).
Anyway, shareware was largely a digression from truly free software. GPL and BSD are evolutions from public domain publications (source listings).
origins of free software Posted Dec 12, 2008 18:59 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I think it's pretty clear Vinge is using FSF terminology ("free software" is free as in freedom, not as in free beer), so that software published without any copyright reserved would not qualify as free software. (It's not free because someone can capture it. He does that by extending it to the point of obsoleting the original, then restricting use of the extended code). However, I think most of the wonderfulness he attributes to free software is really just the wonderfulness of software. And the few points that do involve copyright would hold just as well for public domain software as for free/copyleft/GPL software.
origins of free software Posted Dec 23, 2008 12:01 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
> I think it's pretty clear Vinge is using FSF terminology
> ("free software" is free as in freedom, not as in free beer), > so that software published without any copyright reserved would > not qualify as free software.
Doubtful. The FSF terms this kind of software (the most prominent
a minor quibble Posted Dec 10, 2008 20:01 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I think he's really talking about the GPL, which came later (1989). In '83, RMS started writing the code, alone. Later, he started the GNU project, so it was him and people who assigned their copyrights to the project. But it wasn't until 1989 that RMS wrote the GPL, which was what allows the cooperative development of software by people who aren't project members. On the other hand, I think there's too little credit given to the (1992?) innovation of a project where the contributors own their contributions and license them to the project under the GPL, rather than the project owning the code outright and licensing it to others. I think this is necessary to the concept of a project scaling to enough individual contributors that it behaves as a higher-level organism.
a minor quibble Posted Dec 11, 2008 2:22 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Sorry, "cooperative development of software by people who aren't project members" did come way before the GPL, and is quite separate from copyleft. By 1984 the newsgroups comp.sources.* were alive and thriving (I did get some programs from them, and probably shared a few patches there too). The very first organized source code sharing I could unearth was the SHARE group of IBM users, around 1955. By 1975 there was a SIG TAPE in DECUS (DEC USers) which gathered programs from attentants to its anual event and copied all to the tapes which everybody then took home. AFAICS, by then it already had a longish history. It is true that large-scale cooperative development really started to work in the mid 1980s, but because networks started to reach interested parties, not because somebody came up with some particular license idea (as important as it turned out to be).
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