The myth of the fall is that we imagine we were at a higher place than we are now according to this, but I would say it's not that black and white. In between proprietary products, the foss culture soared, and during years of proprietary product releases, it was relegated to the hacker and academic realms (as opposed to consumer).<p>Let's not forget that the BSD (Net1) debacle didn't even start till about 89 and Linux didn't show up till, what, 91? There is a huge time gap between the origins of the open source culture and the practical availability for tinkerers.<p>Also, please, please don't forget the influence of Minix in this (also not till 87). sidenote: If you weren't aware, Minix 3 is now BSD licensed, and I find it as a ray of hope for the future (10k lines of kernel code vs what, 10mil in linux now? Let's admit it, linux is getting out of control of the open source review principle... but I digress.)<p>The real gem of this article is the end:<p>"We didn’t get here because we failed in our duty to protect a prelapsarian software commons, but because we succeeded in creating one."<p>What that really means is that although open source got us to where we are today, we are still in a very precarious position. "Prelapsarian" is right. We are in a time where the potential for a lapse back to proprietary is far too strong at the moment, and honestly while I understand the arguments between BSD and GPL, I think history has shown that BSD is far too easily abused (Apple/Windows netstacks, etc), and RMS will in the future history books either be considered a visionary ahead of his time or wiped from the pages of history due to the totalitarianism in effect.<p>Software is a social issue, there is no way around that fact, and we ignore it at our peril.<p>(one more sidenote: I think one of the main threats of proprietary these days is, that as open source/foss takes over, it becomes the backend blob that everyone ignores and forgets about. See: GSM stack, etc. We need to keep FOSS close to the hardware)