a minor quibble

Posted Dec 10, 2008 20:01 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: a minor quibble by JoeBuck
Parent article: Interview: Vernor Vinge

I think he's really talking about the GPL, which came later (1989). In '83, RMS started writing the code, alone. Later, he started the GNU project, so it was him and people who assigned their copyrights to the project. But it wasn't until 1989 that RMS wrote the GPL, which was what allows the cooperative development of software by people who aren't project members. On the other hand, I think there's too little credit given to the (1992?) innovation of a project where the contributors own their contributions and license them to the project under the GPL, rather than the project owning the code outright and licensing it to others. I think this is necessary to the concept of a project scaling to enough individual contributors that it behaves as a higher-level organism.

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a minor quibble

Posted Dec 11, 2008 2:22 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Sorry, "cooperative development of software by people who aren't project members" did come way before the GPL, and is quite separate from copyleft. By 1984 the newsgroups comp.sources.* were alive and thriving (I did get some programs from them, and probably shared a few patches there too). The very first organized source code sharing I could unearth was the SHARE group of IBM users, around 1955. By 1975 there was a SIG TAPE in DECUS (DEC USers) which gathered programs from attentants to its anual event and copied all to the tapes which everybody then took home. AFAICS, by then it already had a longish history.

It is true that large-scale cooperative development really started to work in the mid 1980s, but because networks started to reach interested parties, not because somebody came up with some particular license idea (as important as it turned out to be).