OT Free Software
I work for a company that uses free software extensively to support internal systems. We produce some free software because we really needed it for our own purposes. Releasing it more widely has...
Usually, the developers developing free software produce stuff that helps them to be, in some manner, more productive. They produce software that provides their organization some kind...
Back well before the terms open software and free software were coined, they were the norm. A company or university would write something that they needed for their own use and exchange it with other sites. Some of the other sites would enhance it and send a copy to the original authors. The authors were under no obligation to incorporate the enhancements, but often found them useful. The net result was a savings in time for all involved. This soon became formalized with organizations like SHARE¨ running program libraries.
The critics of free software attack it as a revolutionary deviation from capitalism, but, in fact, it was proprietary software that was revolutionary and free software was pioneered by profit-making companies.
That's what gill bates would have you believe, but it is actually proprietary software that is the aberration. In the old days people freely exchanged source code. Even after the advent of chargeable software, some software was distributed only in source code and you had to compile it as part of the installation process.
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