@amerika >I'm a free market guy. A situation where the government says that you can't share software without a license doesn't sound like a free market to me.
>Nothing says you could not hand out source code with your shareware or freeware except that for most people disk space was still very limited. Merely because the source code is also available doesn't make software under a proprietary license not proprietary; https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
I don't believe disk space was the main reason why source code wasn't available, as even since when disk space became plentiful, very little freeware or shareware has included the source code.
@amerika It's quite sad how you can't help but to rewrite history.
Free software predates shareware and freeware by ages, as those only came in after copyright law applied to software and denied the ability to redistribute without a license.
shareware and freeware are a kind of proprietary license; - freeware only allows the mere execution of the software and forbids you from modifying or distributing the software (although many people distributed such undeterred anyway). - shareware similarly forbids modification, but allows redistribution, but it attempts to restrict even execution unless you pay (although some people modified shareware to remove sabotaging antifeatures, although in many cases shareware only contained a limited amount of functionality and you had to pay for the "full version" for all the functionality (i.e. the shareware version of DOOM only contained the first few levels)).
@jeffcliff >both IBM and Cygnus did do a great deal of heavy lifting towards making free software or at least open source socially acceptable. There's a lot of assumptions unpack here.
Free software was socially acceptable from the very start of computing, as people who were into computing shared software freely without hesitation.
Unfortunately, eventually companies like IBM started to smell profit in the field of software and started making software proprietary and launching psyops that it was "wrong" to share software.
MS-DOS and by extension microsoft windows only exists because IBM wanted a proprietary OS to go with their proprietary IBM PC's (the hardware was slightly less proprietary than usual, so the software needed to be extremely proprietary to "compensate" or something), so they got billy to get them an OS.
As a result, when it came to making it "socially unacceptable" to share software, IBM played one of the biggest parts.
Although IBM has released some free software, I don't believe they've done much at all to undo the damage they've done to the concept of socially sharing software.
CyGNUs was completely different and was a business built on providing support for GNU in response to the then recent success of GNU.
At the start Cygnus only supported free software and developed free software (i.e. eCos), but one day decided to start developing proprietary software.
Cygnus and "open source" don't belong in the same sentence, as they were founded in 1989 and was taken over by red hat (merged) in 1999, while "open source" was only a thing since 1998.
>both were clearly imperfect and engaged in the above, it is likely we'd be way further behind if we didn't have both Freedom wise, I think things would have been better if it wasn't for IBM, but worse without Cygnus.
GNU did the heavy lifting in developing free software and spreading freedom, while buzzword enthusiasts did the heavy lifting of shilling the "open source" buzzword.
Although it's kind of a pain in the ass to compile as you need ridiculous amounts of disk space and ccache has to be disabled and it's not bootstrappable (you need to get a compiler binary from icedtea to compile it).
@SuperDicq I was referring to the contents of the video, which displays a lot of proprietary things.
>or are you opposed to any media that doesn't use a free license as well I don't how people put proprietary licenses on media, but that's less of an issue that software, as you can't stop someone from understanding, sharing or modifying a video file in a format that free software can process.
>you don't have to interact with everything I post I watched the video and that's what I thought.