On Jul 3, 2009, at 8:30 AM, Mark Rages wrote:
>
> It was a piece of flaky hardware that started the whole Free  
> Software movement:
> http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html

Ah, bullcrap.  Everyone gives RMS credit for starting the Free  
Software Movement, when in fact the computer science community has a  
long tradition of "open source" that pre-dates GNU and FSF by many  
years (probably decades.)  It's true that the audience was much  
smaller, and perhaps the authors didn't have "I'll sell this and  
become filthy rich" mentality, but the US ARMY saw fit to set up a  
site to host downloads of CP/M freeware and shareware back when RMS  
was hacking mainframes and Lisp machine that normal people could have  
cared less about, and DECUS ("Steal from your friends") was founded  
back when he was still wearing diapers.)

MAYBE they helped codify appropriate publication standards for an  
increasingly commercial and litigious software business environment,  
and MAYBE they just attached a political agenda.  But RMS/FSF did NOT  
originate the idea of Free Software.  (How do you think Wirth's  
compiler (or Richie's) got around in the first place?)

(Sorry.  Pet peeve.  Grr.)


>> and you'd really go looking thru 100s of 1000s of lines of source  
>> code and spend long hours debugging the ICD2 interface only to find  
>> out you don't know why it randomly flakes out either, right?

Maybe, maybe not.  But it's nice to have the opportunity.   Even  
moderately well written code isn't so hard to fix bugs in (or add  
features/workaround) without having to read/understand the whole  
thing.  Shucks, I've modified programs written in languages that I  
don't even know how to program in...

BillW


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