| ▲ | shmerl a day ago | |||||||||||||
Don't forget the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists that followed: | ||||||||||||||
| ▲ | salgernon a day ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||
One minor thing to consider is that hobbyists weren't distributing the source code (as posted in the OP) but trading the paper tape of the executable interpreter. They wanted the interpreter so they could write their own software that was probably unrelated to basic itself, that was just a means to an end. The industry pretty quickly moved to incorporate basic in rom on many platforms and microsoft was able to capitalize on that integration through licensing. I don't think his letter did much other than antagonize hobbyists - but they made a lot licensing to the hardware manufacturers later on (and the hardware was truly more valuable with basic on board. (One of my all time to this day favorite computers from that era is the TRS-80 Model 100. I don't remember if Microsoft provided the entire software stack for it, but I believe it was the last product that Bill Gates actually contributed to the software development.) | ||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||
And he won that argument. The steady movement away from Free Software licenses to shared source is because developers want to get paid by people using the code they created just as Gates describes in the letter. Even Bruce Perens is trying to hammer out a Post-Open Source license that's proprietary in all but name. | ||||||||||||||
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