Re:Richard Stallman Explains [video]
by rglullis on Sunday August 13, 2017 @03:20PM
(#15004429)
You are right that we can not make a perfectly quantifiable experiment to check the rate of innovation in a "purely Free, RMS-style" world vs the current one where proprietary software is also allowed.
But using that as an excuse to keep believing that "we could have gotten where we are only with Free Software" is a cop-out. We don't need to have an alternate timeline. We can think of our existing one as the (non-linear) superposition of two competing philosophies and their development: the hobbyist/academic/free one & the commercial/private/proprietary/profit-motive-based
one on the other. We can surely come up with some kind of model to see how the "free economy" would fare if there was no "proprietary" agent.
You have said it yourself: there was a revolution going on, but it was only affecting the hobbyists, the enthusiasts. It took the "proprietary" side to exist to make it computing something as universal as it has become.
Without proprietary software, there would be no BSD 4.4, Linus would not have anything to clone for the PC, there would be no Free/Open/NetBSD, and so on.
Remove these from the "software economy" of today, and what would we have? Minix? HURD? "Innovative", alright. But certainly never able to compete with the proprietary (or proprietary-clones) alternatives at any point in time.
But using that as an excuse to keep believing that "we could have gotten where we are only with Free Software" is a cop-out. We don't need to have an alternate timeline. We can think of our existing one as the (non-linear) superposition of two competing philosophies and their development: the hobbyist/academic/free one & the commercial/private/proprietary/profit-motive-based one on the other. We can surely come up with some kind of model to see how the "free economy" would fare if there was no "proprietary" agent.
You have said it yourself: there was a revolution going on, but it was only affecting the hobbyists, the enthusiasts. It took the "proprietary" side to exist to make it computing something as universal as it has become.
Without proprietary software, there would be no BSD 4.4, Linus would not have anything to clone for the PC, there would be no Free/Open/NetBSD, and so on.
Remove these from the "software economy" of today, and what would we have? Minix? HURD? "Innovative", alright. But certainly never able to compete with the proprietary (or proprietary-clones) alternatives at any point in time.