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Comment by Karellen | Hacker News Reader

> First, let’s take a look at how we got here.

> Open source eats the world (and needs some Tums)

> Early software was written by researchers and academics, and open by default—it couldn’t even be copyrighted until 1974. We didn’t even have the now-common phrase “open source” until Christine Peterson coined it in 1998. That same year, the OSI formed and established the aforementioned open source definition, which remains the yardstick by which openness is judged today.

I realise that this is intentionally a very highly-compressed version of history, but completely eliding the creation of the Free Software movement in the '80s, which Open Source grew out of (and specifically in reaction to), feels more like a bit of creative whitewashing than just a "well, we didn't have space to fit in everything" editing choice.

Or is that just me?

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Free Software as explicitly anti-corporate is not something Microsoft likes to remind itself of.

Free/Libre Software is not anti-corporate, it is pro-user's freedom to use, modify, sell and improve such software

A huge part of the GPL vs BSD wars were fought explicitly around balancing pro freedom vs preventing corporate takeover (and the various spawned GPLs are even more explicit).

It's anti-corporate-abuse-of-users, which in Microsoft's case is exactly the same.

It’s anti-corporate by purpose, but its philosophy is in opposition, or maybe just neutral, to corporate software sold for profit.

If floss takes over the world there’s no place for corporate software.

But I think it’s a false dichotomy and we will be a pluralistic state (like we are now) where there’s free/libre software that’s really popular and also corporate software where no one wants to volunteer their time to build.

But I understand how Microsoft could think that GPL is a threat to them. Linux did kind of kill (is killing) their dream of every server in the world running windowsnt.

It's not just you. I think it is with great generosity that this article can be described as merely ignorant.

> I realise that this is intentionally a very highly-compressed version of history, but

Author here. As you say, it's a highly-compressed version of history. Getting into the finer points of the evolution of open source wouldn't really have had any bearing on the rest of the article.

Honestly, it is not possible to perceive it as being written in good faith.

I suppose we'll just have to respectfully disagree about which precursors are "finer points of evolution" and which are "major foundational cornerstones" of Open Source.

It was definitely a major thing. But in this discussion, the main points we even focused on about the characteristics of open source when defining it were the same as the FSF:

"When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes."

The bigger part of the "how we got here" was actually that GitHub ended up creating this ecosystem where collaboration was so open and easier to use to a larger population that we ran into an unintended consequence: maintainers being overwhelmed.

The overall history was intentionally a very quick, broad brush stroke to move into the points that pertained to someone feeling like they had to close their project to contributions.

Highly compressing out the most important part of open source is kind of funny. Especially since you call out the person who arguably coined the phrase.

Also, this is your readme so it’s not like you have some editor pressuring you to cut down.

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