Back then, there was this enormous revolutionary fervor around free software, and it was intensely idealogical. You used the GPL because you wanted to fuck Microsoft and the entire concept of proprietary code. Linux was punk, not a good “solution.” And every time someone hacked up a free version of something, we all rejoiced, not because it “didn’t cost anything,” but because it was another way to make the point that the entire concept of making money off binary blobs was inherently evil. Install fests! Bring us that old 486, and we’ll make it YOURS! What a party.
Were we hopelessly naive? Maybe. Probably. But I find it depressing to read threads like this. It’s like everybody is just doing some kind of cost benefit analysis, but nobody is asking serious questions about whether the world we built is actually the world we want.
I’ll say it: If many of you had walked into some scrappy LUG in 1996, you’d have been laughed out of there as some kind of tool.
Are you a tool? I don’t know. But the resignation still bums me out. Y’all want to “support OSS devs,” not throw a sledgehammer at the screen.