

Crazy hippies and evil corporations: Open source in the commercial world - astro-
http://radek.io/2015/07/20/open-source-in-the-commercial-world/

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dalke
> In 1998, a group of free software supporters decided to rebrand the
> movement, freeing it from the moral views and highlighting the benefits that
> working together has for business. That’s when the term open source was born
> and it became an important first step in making the two polar opposites see
> how could they work together.

That's a revisionist view, or perhaps just a simplification that happens to
discard examples that end up weakening the argument.

We already by the early 1990s had "first steps" where free software and
corporate, for-profit companies work together. Cygnus Solutions with GNU
support, Lucid Inc. with Lucid Emacs, and NeXT with Objective C are companies
who in ~1990 were shipping free software products. With NeXT, that includes
the 'polar opposites' of Jobs and Stallman.

(And you'll note that _Jobs_ was an actual hippie.)

This essay also views "Companies that use and modify community projects and
never give back" as "evil".

This view, while not uncommon, is contrary to software freedom. Quoting from
[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) : "You should also have
the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or
play."

Companies which "never give back" are not evil nor even pushing the edge. They
are doing exactly what the free software movement says they can do.

