>Stallman, in particular, wants to go back to old days
no, because he simple dont know what the old days are as he never worked outside the academic biotope where everything published is public domain by law. He simply projecting his privileged situation at the AI lab at MIT with the real world, where everything has its price. Beyoud all the reidicoulos accusations of Bill Gates, M$, and Apple, we know that then market leader IBM gaven up the combined software/hardware solutions for selling the software separately in the late 60 just for the reason of avoiding AT&T's fate.

Before that day vendor software consists of some primitive assemblers, linkers, and optionally a fortran compiler which might have had included sources or not what doesn't matter as it all was written in assembler, highly machine dependend and hardly readable. Note that these software packages also weren't free but part of the machine the vendor sold for millions of $. Hence there never was the free software paradise of richards ideology which is nothing else than politics.

As I already mentioned already in the 70ths software wasn't free but very expensive. My boss would have fired me immediataly for giving the sources to the customer or anybody else. And this is OK so as we all have to pay the bills and not all of us can live a privileged life by donations as Richard does.