Craig Small: 25 Years of Free Software


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So you have written something you think others might like, what software license will you use to distribute it? In 1995 it wasn’t that clear. This was the era of strange boutique licenses including ones where it was ok to run the program as a hamradio operator but not a CB radio operator (or at least they tried to work it that way).
A friend of mine and the author of the Linux HAM HOWTO amongst other documents, Terry Dawson, suggested I use GPL or another Free Software license. He explained what this Free Software thing was and said that if you want your program to be the most useful then something like GPL will do it. So I released axdigi under the GPL license and most of my programs since then have used the same license. Something like MIT or BSD licenses would have been fine too, I was just not going to use something closed or hand-crafted.
That was a while ago, I’ve written or maintained many programs since then. I also became a Debian maintainer (23 years so far) and adopted both procps and psmisc which I still maintain as both the Debian developer and upstream to this day.
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