back then internet was exciting. back then there was internet

the harmless discussions were boring filler for the interesting ones. but we lost them all.

The discussion GPL vs the corps. The corps wanted to use linux for free and make money. they won when linus gave up and added "tainted" message. now everyone just skin the reference implementation and ship a vulnerable modem or iot and we like that.

Google and samsung ships billions of android devices *with no source code for most of the system* and we think that is fine and that android is open source and that linux is healthy when all it does is host a bunch of binary blobs for every piece of the hardware.

then we had discussions on hosted GPL vs the corps. Where the corps won again when we all gave up and came up with the agpl compromise. aws business model is "bigger Cpanel, with more OSS software we get for free". They sold RH business model to everyone who thought RHEL was too expensive, by charging even more. genius.

i see an oldtimer here :)

yea.. well.. gpl/etc fight was lost. On the upside, we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole. Through usage of gpl software, even in non-compliant way, were created a whole lot of companies (and jobs) and products that are widely used. Without it we might have had 1% of current selection and it would have been based on vxworks and totally locked down.

you win some, you loose some

no, i don't assume that we would have been using dead/dated tech. There probably would have been new tech, but much less of it. Open source lowered threshold for developing new solutions, both boxed and *aaS. I worked in a bunch of startups, mostly in network and security areas. Without open source most of them wouldn't have been possible or not viable

> we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole.

my point is that no, we didn't.

What can I say? I graduated college and realized politics affects me.

It took you an entire university education to reach that conclusion? Were you a polisci major? :-)