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Old 5th June 2014
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IdOp IdOp is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: twisting on the daemon's fork(2)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rocket357 View Post
I'm willing to bet, though, that if Linus had put his skills to use in BSD, the open source landscape wouldn't be incredibly different from what it is today...Stallman or not.
Yes, that's my speculation also, even without both of them. (Of course, we can never know for sure because we don't have the option of going back in time and seeing what would have happened without Stallman.) Not to diminish RJS's influence on exactly what is today, but there are just so many people interested in open source -- a natural idea that existed outside of GNU anyway. I imagine people would have done things under a wide variety of licenses, just as today, and might even have come up with neighbours of the GPL independently. Exactly how the distribution of works among licenses would compare to what it is today is hard to say, but I think in very broad terms things would be similar. Then again, maybe I'm not being imaginative enough about other possibilities.
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