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 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
