Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Posted Jun 16, 2011 19:27 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar) by bronson
Parent article: Proprietary software keeps users helpless (TechRadar)

Before there was any GNU project or FSF, the BSD folks were freeing the code to their system. The whole TeX system has always been open source, since its beginnings in 1978. I fondly remember the vibrant communities to be found in the Usenet comp.sources.* groups in the early 1980s. DECUS had their yearly meeting where tapes with source were swapped (SIG TAPE), at least since 1975. IBM had their SHARE user's group, which distributed contributed code since around 1955. So yes, open source predates the GNU project by a couple of decades. Sure, RMS came up with a very important concept (copyleft), and rallied a bunch of people around it. But he certainly wasn't the first, and far from the only one, to advocate code sharing.