And then the world started moving on, with other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility.

It was a great start, but you need to adapt or you perish.

When VSCode et all beging shipping DRM and who knows what in their extensions, then we'll se what with happens with these half-shareware semilibre projects.

Specially when propietary dependencies kill thousands of projects at once.

Well, you are already unable to get most of the functionality out of vscode without Microsoft's extension store.

I, for one, am happy that there are still a couple of people here and there that you can really trust on this stuff.

> other licenses that gave even more freedom and flexibility

That gave vendors more freedom and flexibility (to lock their software away from their customers.)

As usual, customers got less freedom and flexibility.

I disagree. They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary, or not created at all (due to the compounding effects of open source)

We are currently talking about GCC, where they would have gotten the source prior to LLVM.

> They got software that’s open under a different license that otherwise would have just been purely proprietary

This is not a given, even outside of compilers. It's a heck of a cope there.

> Without GNU, GPL and Richard Stallman, FOSS would not exist in the first place. The GPL forced companies to make FOSS a thing, whether they liked it or not.

I was responding to this, which is more widespread than GCC (although it was one of the first wins of the GNU).

There were various companies who wanted to add on backends and other bits to GCC, but wouldn’t due to the license. That’s one of the reasons LLVM is so popular.

As with any other achievement of civilization, younger generations will at some point find why previous ones fought for something and how it sucks to loose it.

But when this realization comes, it will be too late.

Bsd was long a thing proving you wrong. Yes gpl got more press but the other options existed for long.

Yes, and UNIX vendors and MS were happilly taking pieces of it without upstreaming.

I think without GNU/Linux, most likely all UNIX vendors would have a better market share today.

I doubt that. People often say "without <person that started thing> we wouldn't have <thing>!" but it's nonsense. Someone else would have done it just slightly later.

The question is if that person would have dedicated their life in the same way.