LinuxGazette: Homer’s Open Source Odyssey 2001: Classical Computing and a Brief History of OSS

“The realm of open source and “classical computing” may
represent a hybrid paradigm, wherein programming is closer in
essence to physics and mathematics than it is to inventing the
world’s first functional airplane, or the first light bulb. One
cannot patent scientific laws nor mathematical concepts, and thus
physics and mathematics have always been open-source endeavours.

In programming the fundamental algorithms are immutable ideals,
and though they may be used as machines to ferry information about
the globe, when one attempts to patent the machine, one is perhaps
trying to take too much credit for the algorithms developed by
others, or for immutable ideals which were always there. It seems
that more and more innovations in contemporary information
technology are dwarfed by the giants upon which they are based, for
what sole inventor or invention can be greater than the open
platform upon which it is invented, such as Linux and C++?

The GNU General Public License takes the “standing upon the
shoulders of giants” aspect of software development into
account…”

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