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A comment on I'm not good enough to work on open source software. Parent comment

Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by npsimons on Thursday March 22, 2012 @12:31PM (#3740534)
I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source. When you bought a program (if they didn't throw it in for free with the bloody expensive hardware) you ALWAYS got source code. People still sell open source software; I've never understood why people think that commercial software is incompatible with open source. It isn't.
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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by wmf on Thursday March 22, 2012 @02:37PM (#3741267)
Everything was open source, but "everything" wasn't much. There was no VisiCalc, no WordStar, no Sierra adventures. Bill Gates's packaged software business model allowed a lot of new software to be created.
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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by bunderbunder on Thursday March 22, 2012 @01:02PM (#3740727)
I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source.

And yet, computing professionals were much less free than they are now. Because programmers almost universally worked at the King's pleasure.

The exception to that rule was small garage shops. Like Microsoft and Apple.

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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by herval on Thursday March 22, 2012 @05:39PM (#3742152)
your own statement explains why it was like that: because software was just a small commodity passed along the real stuff (the hardware). Not much of an industry there...
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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by JoeAltmaier on Thursday March 22, 2012 @02:07PM (#3741118)
??? What utopian world did you live in? Before Microsoft and Apple was before the Internet. Open Source was a dream, everything was proprietary, software engineers were just Coders.

What does it even mean to say "When you bought a program..." in the context of Open Source? Of course if you paid for it, it isn't open source.

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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by chronomex on Thursday March 22, 2012 @02:30PM (#3741226)
The very GNU GPL itself explicitly allows code licensed under it to be sold for money. What makes you think that code transferred for money cannot possibly be Free?
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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by paulhauggis on Thursday March 22, 2012 @03:11PM (#3741412)
Everyone always says this, but the majority of the community is very much against you making money on it and will destroy any chances if you making any sort of profit by releasing the source for free (which is allowed under the license).
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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by DanBC on Thursday March 22, 2012 @06:32PM (#3742386)
Most people can't compile software. Forking and releasing a compiled free version would be more likely to kill a project.

But then see also Pysol; a free open source program that was being sold by sneaky companies. The devs decided to stop releasing it.

(http://bytes.com/topic/python/answers/41344-pysol-using-qt-c...)

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Re:I'm not good enough to work on open source software by JoeAltmaier on Thursday March 22, 2012 @02:42PM (#3741287)
Don't be silly. If you can't look at it without paying, it isn't open source.
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