POSS Chap 1 Part 1.1
De Framalang Wiki.
The Rise of Proprietary Software and Free Software
As the industry matured, several interrelated changes occurred simultaneously. The wild diversity of hardware designs gradually gave way to a few clear winners—winners through superior technology, superior marketing, or some combination of the two. At the same time, and not entirely coincidentally, the development of so-called "high level" programming languages meant that one could write a program once, in one language, and have it automatically translated ("compiled") to run on different kinds of computers. The implications of this were not lost on the hardware manufacturers: a customer could now undertake a major software engineering effort without necessarily locking themselves into one particular computer architecture. When this was combined with the gradual narrowing of performance differences between various computers, as the less efficient designs were weeded out, a manufacturer that treated its hardware as its only asset could look forward to a future of declining profit margins. Raw computing power was becoming a fungible good, while software was becoming the differentiator. Selling software, or at least treating it as an integral part of hardware sales, began to look like a good strategy.
This meant that manufacturers had to start enforcing the copyrights on their code more strictly. If users simply continued to share and modify code freely among themselves, they might independently reimplement some of the improvements now being sold as "added value" by the supplier. Worse, shared code could get into the hands of competitors. The irony is that all this was happening around the time the Internet was getting off the ground. Just when truly unobstructed software sharing was finally becoming technically possible, changes in the computer business made it economically undesirable, at least from the point of view of any single company. The suppliers clamped down, either denying users access to the code that ran their machines, or insisting on non-disclosure agreements that made effective sharing impossible.
