[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Before ‘open source,’ before free software, there was software
in the public domain. You could say that software in the public
domain was truly free. The code was ‘open source’ and the user had
the right to take it, break it, appropriate it, re-use it, package
it, sell it, re-brand and license it, or do what you will with
it.“The problem with software in the public domain, was that, more
often than not, any changes to the software didn’t come back to the
developer in any usable form, and modifications didn’t revert to
the original maintainer of the code. In some cases the software was
appropriated and relicensed by the user. In other words there was
no guarantee that the software would remain free, or would
grow…”