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

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-radi… - Ted