Public Domain. That's what those of us who argued against the GPL from the outset suggested.

Even Richard Stallman, after writing the GPL, agreed the Public Domain software was also Free Software. The GPL was not the only codification of Free Software, even by RMS standards.

BTW, TRS-80s came out well after I started programming, thank you very much. :-)

Sure, that's right. Stallman burst into existence complete with a copy of the GPL in hand. All of the rumors about the tons of work that he did for free software development before starting the FSF are complete fabrications. The code that he worked on before the GPL simply doesn't exist.

Puhleeeze. The alternate (to you) universe to which you refer is "reality".

Scott Fahlman once told me that Richard Stallman convinced him to make CMU Common Lisp public domain . . . and then later decided that it would be better with restrictions (GPL).

It is simply wrong to state that prior to OSS, "Free Software" meant GPL. There were significant Public Domain projects, e. g. Fahlman's CMU Common Lisp, and code with what we would now call BSD-Style licenses, before the GPL ever existed.

Even Stallman admitted at the time that Public Domain was *also* Free Software though he debated with people like me who felt that if GPL is Free then Public Domain is Freer Than Free. CMUCL's decision to go Public Domain meant that it served as a Reference Implementation to foster a Lisp software industry while also providing all of the other benefits of Stallman's flavor of Free Software, without the restrictions.

He used to emacs (older open source, also largely due to rms' efforts) to begin that gcc project.

But many people would prefer that the GPL never existed, favoring less restriction, e. g. BSD style or outright Public Domain. Scott Fahlman, who's CMU Common Lisp was developed in the Public Domain said that it was RMS who convinced him to do it . . . and who later circled back to try to get CMUCL to use the restrictive GPL. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed and the vast majority of the CMUCL code base is in the Public Domain and still under active development today.

25 years ago, this issue of Computer Chronicle quoted Bill Joy (at the 13:53 mark) saying that "Open Source" is one reason reason that Unix "will be popular with scientists and engineer for some time."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-167233195342018803&q=computer+chronicles#

I think that people read the article and found it lacking. If the article were entitled "The Open Source label after 12 years", or "12 years of rebranding Free Software", etc. you would see less reaction. This article attempts to promote the label to be the thing itself, but the thing itself is much more than 12 years old.

I would ask you -- and the authors of the article -- to focus more on the underlying issue and less on the superficial wording issues.

``If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.''

What a great idea!
  . . . said the teenage girl impregnated by her stepfather
  . . . said everyone everywhere who has a disease that they want to keep secret
  . . . said the Chinese dissident trying to communicate with her child

People use envelopes on their personal letters to be private, not criminal. People keep their medical, and other, records private because they're personal. ``None of your business'' does not mean ``I'm committing a crime.''

Privacy is about being a human being.