Well, TBH it didn’t have the impact I thought it might (and that RMS feared — obviously I disagreed with him). Libraries qua libraries aren’t distributed / sold so much any more as standalone packages and now we mostly have no-cost binary blobs tied to hardware or a priced API or MIT-ish-licensed stuff (like boost or npm), sadly neither of which empower any right to repair.
That decade of Cygnus was a lot of hard yakka first to legitimize the idea of free software at all (in 1989 it was mostly both obscure and insane outside academia) and then popularize it. Obviously other people started working hard on this too later in the decade.
The thing that made probably the most significant difference was the process of forking gcc which was a lot of negotiation — at that time forking a code base was widely considered a tragedy, despite the whole structure of free software!). Making forking good rather than a tragedy, coming up with an independent steering committee, and in that case getting the FSF to stop complaining decide to try to run out in front of the parade* was really hard but in the long term it became an approach that most important open source projects have taken, providing stability and progress. That’s definitely been an opment!
And then within a few years…I was on to other, more important things. It felt like the free software / open source world was no longer an embryo so didn’t need me. Plenty of other people are doing great work, better than I would have the enthusiasm for these days.
* Yes yet another case where RMS was furious about something that in the long term was a big win for the FSF too.
That decade of Cygnus was a lot of hard yakka first to legitimize the idea of free software at all (in 1989 it was mostly both obscure and insane outside academia) and then popularize it. Obviously other people started working hard on this too later in the decade.
The thing that made probably the most significant difference was the process of forking gcc which was a lot of negotiation — at that time forking a code base was widely considered a tragedy, despite the whole structure of free software!). Making forking good rather than a tragedy, coming up with an independent steering committee, and in that case getting the FSF to stop complaining decide to try to run out in front of the parade* was really hard but in the long term it became an approach that most important open source projects have taken, providing stability and progress. That’s definitely been an opment!
And then within a few years…I was on to other, more important things. It felt like the free software / open source world was no longer an embryo so didn’t need me. Plenty of other people are doing great work, better than I would have the enthusiasm for these days.
* Yes yet another case where RMS was furious about something that in the long term was a big win for the FSF too.