[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[Larry McVoy]

+1 to everything Ted said, that's the world I lived in.  I have a love
hate relationship to the GPL, I'm ok with GPLv2, not so much with v3.

I just think that Clem has led a somewhat blessed life where people
knew he was someone that should not have roadblocks, the roadblocks
just limit how much goodness Clem is gonna give you.  So he had source
access without thinking about it, he had whatever he wanted, that was
"normal" for him.  For a lot of the rest of us, we were not seen as
good as Clem so we had to deal with all the asinine roadblocks so 
we could give you some goodness.  It wasn't easy.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 05:58:24PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> It seems that you are primarily arguing that the idea of "Open
> Systems" predates that of the Free Software and Open Source movements.
> That's no doubt true, chronologically speaking.  However, for those of
> us who came up a bit after you, from our perspective, the "Open
> Systems" movement *failed*.  Source code for Solaris, Ultrix, AIX, was
> very hard to get, and when we could get it, we were not able to make
> changes and share them with others.
> 
> I've told the story before about how MIT managed to obtain a Unix
> license without the infamous "methods and concepts" clause.  It was
> able to continue to renew it because, quite frankly, AT&T needed
> access to MIT researchers more than the other way around, so it was a
> matter of sheer power politics.  But AT&T refused to *acknowledge*
> that MIT had a Unix license to Digital, so the only way MIT Project
> Athena got access to Ultrix and OSF/1 sources was through back
> channels where MIT alumni working at DEC passed unofficial source
> tapes complete with editor backup and coredumps.  But officially, once
> AT&T refused to acknowledge that MIT had a valid Unix license (even
> though we did), MIT wasn't able to get *legal* source snapshots from
> Digital.
> 
> So this is why I don't view the Open Systems movement with quite the
> same rose colored classes as others.
> 
> It's also why I like the GPL license, because it forces people to give
> the code back.  Essentially I have *zero* trust that corporate
> entities will do anything other than maximize shareholder value, and
> if that means taking BSD licensed code, and adding their own secret
> sauce, and not returning it back to the commons --- which is part what
> led to the mess which was Solaris, HPUX, AIX, etc., that's exactly
> what companies will do.
> 
> Companies may have mission statements saying things like "don't be
> evil", but sooner or later, that phrase will quietly disappear and
> companies will start making more and more compromises in pursuit of
> the almighty dollar.  So if it helps, consider thinking of the GPL
> license as a commitment device[1] for the philosophy of Open Systems.  :-)
> 
> [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-me-from-myself-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
> 
> 						- Ted
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm