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Open Source Won’t Save Us
Free software dates to 1983. Dr. Stallman announced GNU that September, the Free Software Foundation followed in 1985, and the GPL turned the four freedoms into something you could enforce in court. By the time anyone said “open source,” the movement it renamed had fifteen years of code behind it: Emacs, GCC, most of a working operating system.
And the talking mattered as much as the code. In 1991 a Finnish student who’d been steeped in the GNU world wrote a kernel for fun, licensed it under Dr. Stallman’s GPL, and dropped it into the fifteen years of GNU userland already waiting for it. That student was Linus Torvalds, and that’s why Linux became an operating system instead of a hobby tarball. In 1997 Werner Koch heard Dr. Stallman speak in Germany, urging Europeans to build a free replacement for PGP that US crypto export law couldn’t touch; Koch went home and wrote GPG, the tool journalists and dissidents still stake their lives on. No preaching, no Linux, no GPG. The preacher was load-bearing.
