Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
142 lines (110 loc) · 7.17 KB

license.md

File metadata and controls

142 lines (110 loc) · 7.17 KB

 

 home   |   syllabus   |   groups   |   moodle   |   video   |   review   |   © 2022

Licenses

Welcome to 1976 and the Homebrew Computer Club

Everyone was there. Everybody shared

  • Steve Wozniak – Co-founder of Apple Computers
  • Steve Jobs – Co-founder of Apple Computers
  • Fred Moore – Co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club
  • Ted Nelson – Inventor of the back button, creator of Project Xanadu
  • Harry Garland
  • Lee Felsenstein
  • Roger Melen – Cromemco
  • Thomas “Todd” Fischer – IMSAI Division in Fischer-Freitas Company
  • George Morrow – Morrow Designs
  • Paul Terrell – Byte Shop
  • Adam Osborne – Osborne Computer
  • Bob Marsh – Processor Technology
  • Lee Felsenstein – developer of Sol-20 and Osborne 1
  • John Draper
  • Jerry Lawson – creator of the first cartridge-based video game system
  • Li-Chen Wang – Palo Alto Tiny Basic and graphics software for Cromemco Dazzler developer
  • Steve Inness – primary designer of early cell phone touch screens
  • Dan Werthimer – extraterrestrial intelligence researcher
  • Gordon French – Co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club

Then one day, Bill Gates told them that enough was enough. Hence, Microsoft.

  • Open Letter to Hobbyists
  • To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
  • Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Alkair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, R3M and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
  • The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however. 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair 2::.r,zzs have bought SkSIC), a113
  1. The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent of Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.

  • Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

  • Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The-royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can a•’- ford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are wrLting 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

  • What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but thosewho have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

  • I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write me at 1180 Alvarado SE, g114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

  • Bill Gates
    General Partner, Micro-Soft

But the rebels disagreed. And their rebellion grew profitable.

There were wars

  • "How much do we need to pay you to screw Netscape? This is your lucky day," Gates told executives of America Online Inc., according to an internal memo compiled by AOL.

The times changed:

  • In 2014, Satya Nadella was named the new CEO of Microsoft. Microsoft began to adopt open source into its core business. In contrast to Ballmer's stance, Nadella presented a slide that read, "Microsoft loves Linux".[12] At the time of the acquisition of GitHub, Nadella said of Microsoft, "We are all in on open source."

Anyway, how to choose a license:

Feel free to roll your own, but beware "going off the reservation" (if you pick a rare license, then your support will be rare too):

Category License Name
Highly restrictive Eclipse Public License 1.0/ European Union Public License 1.1
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0
GNU General Public License v2.0 / GNU General Public License v3.0
LaTeX Project Public License v1.3c / Microsoft Reciprocal License
Mozilla Public License 2.0 / SIL Open Font License 1.1 / Open Software License 3.0
Retrictive GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 / GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
BSD 3-clause Clear License / Apache License 2.0 / Artistic License 2.0
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 / Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
Academic Free License v3.0 / Microsoft Public License
Unrestrictive BSD 2-clause “Simplified” License / BSD 3-clause “New” or “Revised” License
ISC License / MIT License / The Unlicense /zlib License

It is a factor predicting for project popularity:

But other factors matter as well:

And now developers actually are getting tired of their open source work being used by others