Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

I also think that a lot of people have no clue about what is free software/open source at its root.

Nothing was said to make money, be rich or avoid someone else (being big companies) becoming rich.

At the origin, the greatness of the concept was that you were free on your own computer to do whatever you wanted, how you wanted it. For yourself. And more particularly, FOSS was allowing anyone to have access to tools and server software that was restricted to companies with very expensive and complicated licenses before that.

See Linux that gave access to an Unix-like OS at a time were it was unreachable to hobbyist. In my own time, I remember this incredible pleasure of being able to host his own web server with WAMP or LAMP stack, at a time where you were forced to buy and use windows Pro with corporate license IIS to host even a simple website...

Nowadays, the greatness of FOSS is that anyone can still access for free, without string attached, to all the software needed to train and run LLM models.

> See Linux that gave access to an Unix-like OS at a time were it was unreachable to hobbyist.

This is revisionist history. Linux eventually supplanted FreeBSD, which was widely used and popular in the 1990s. FreeBSD was also objectively the better OS back then, a clean and reliable system.

What made Linux successful over the long-term IMO is that they evolved the kernel much faster and earlier than FreeBSD, particularly when it came to hardware scalability and performance, which was advantageous with the progression of Moore’s Law. The cluster-style supercomputers were developed almost entirely on Linux as a result, which created a positive feedback cycle. Second, the Linux user-land quickly became really pleasant to use compared to most other UNIX flavors at the time because they weren’t too concerned with purity or being strictly interoperable with some other UNIX.

Most people in the industry today don’t remember the era of at least a dozen different UNIX-style OS being widely used. I probably used half of them in anger at some point. In that environment Linux won by having a superior UX out of the box for a lot of use cases, even if you paid the absurd money for one of the proprietary UNIX flavors. Later Linux started demonstrating better performance too. FreeBSD was definitely tidier and cleaner with its much slower evolution but sometimes worse is better.

> This is revisionist history. […]

FreeBSD came quite a bit later than GNU and Linux. The BSDs were also plagued by the whole AT&T mess.

As someone who was around at the time… I cannot really relate to your comment.

While Linux was technically released a year or two earlier, the contemporaneous versions of FreeBSD were much more mature. Linux was pretty unusable as a production server for the first several years but FreeBSD was more than serviceable.

I used them both almost from the beginning of their existence. Linux was a novelty early on but FreeBSD was serving a lot of the load in Silicon Valley for a big chunk of the 1990s. Linux didn’t really hit its stride until the 2000s. Linux was pretty actively bad early on if you just needed a UNIX server.

We will have to disagree, by 1993 we (University) used it all over the place for production with either Slackware or Debian. Which where rock solid. FreeBSD barely worked around the time, and even with the FreeBSD 2.0 release which nuked a bunch of things due to the whole AT&T mess, people eschewed it like the plauge.

That GNU/Linux hit its stride "in the 2000s" is ... what is revisionism of history here to the point of it being an absurd thing to say.

> Nothing was said to make money, be rich or avoid someone else (being big companies) becoming rich.

Sometimes many people don't realise the value of information is not there in individual blogpost but when you can combine them into a holistic approach. A drop of water by itself is useless, only a body of water becomes useful.

The entire FOSS creed is just giving people permission to create things without the fear of someone coming along and stealing all of their work/art for profit.

Sure, people can come along and make money off of it, but they can't steal it. It's unstealable. Therefore, you're free to create.

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