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Because Berkeley lied when they said that they had to provide transcripts or remove the material. Section 107 of the copyright act 1976 allows for fair use for teaching materials, and this allows 3rd parties to make available all such materials in more accessible forms, and for Berkeley to use the results of such work.

They weren't interested in doing this. It's about monetization and artificial scarcity, pure and simple. This was just a smokescreen to remove the material.

The blind will be using TTS screen readers such as non-visual desktop access anyway, and deaf people can still read the materials, and use STT software for converting speech to text (and to all those idiots who continue to say that speech-to-text doesn't work because it didn't when you tried it in 1995, try dictating your SMS messages - it's quicker and more accurate than trying to use an on-screen keyboard).

It was all more fun back then because everything was NEW. It was AWESOME. Today ... meh.

But to your point about what the world would look like without Stalman ...

[rant]
1. No GPL. So Linus would have released his software under his original license, which was free for home users, paid for commercial users.
2. No GPL hassles. Anyone who wanted truly free software would build upon the *BSDs.
3. Given a choice between (1) and (2), businesses would all have opted for (2), because they can actually build upon it to make products users will pay for, like Apple (OSX) and Sony (Playstation 3/4) do.
4. Anyone else could also build upon the *BSDs, and either release the source or sell the combined software, or whatever combo they wished to do.

The printer driver problem that Stalman ran into was not really all that big a deal. Someone gives you state of the art equipment to play around with (a cutting-edge laser printer) and they would naturally expect that if there were problems, you would tell them, they would fix them, and improve their product. No just give you and everyone else the source code to that other companies can use it without any sweat equity.

Stalman's snit shows just how juvenile his thinking really is. He took personal offense because they exercised their freedom to not give the source. He doesn't want freedom - he wants control under his terms. F*ck you, Stalman.

The same people who decry closed software don't object to closed software for games, or for making closed software when they can make a buck out of it (apps apps apps). Stalman thinks everyone should live like he did, living in his university office, because making profit from working on/selling proprietary software is somehow evil ...

Until around 1998, my office at MIT was also my residence. I was even registered to vote from there.

and

I was just kind of curious. I can be "strange/non-conformist". I don't do deodorant. Don't do telephones (e.g. i rarely carry my cellphone and only use my landline for recruiters to spam my phone). I tried natural toothpaste because I don't like the effects of fluoride.
I don't feel so bad. Richard Stallman doesn't look like he bathes, shaves, plus he lived out of the MIT lab. Some people are stranger than me.
Bot Berlin
July 15th, 2008 2:28pm

Yes, and Charles Manson kills people -- that doesn't mean we want to compare ourselves to him.
SaveTheHubble
July 15th, 2008 2:29pm

The guy is an asshole. Remember when he wrote this:

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

s/Jobs/Richard Stalman/g

The GPL actually helps companies like Microsoft maintain their preeminent position because you can't make any real money selling GPL software, so development lags, there's no promotional budget, manufacturers don't care if your software runs on their devices or not. So guess who gets market and mindshare, even for open source software? It's why the free screen readers on Linux are crap compared to this free windows one. It's why decent text-to-speech and speech-to-text on Android actually works - Google is making their profit by getting their apps in front of everyone. If they had tried to sell android, they would have been up against the entrenched players - sun, microsoft, nokia, rim

Well said. I'd say open source projects are successful when they give those contributing what they want. In my case, I volunteer for projects that help blind/VI people, projects like Vinux - Linux for the Vision Impaired, SpeechHub - free voices everywhere, NVDA - the free screen reader for the blind, and Orca - the Linux screen reader. I also contribute algorithms, such as libsonic - speeding up speech for speed listeners, and an enhanced FFT algorithm for speech recognition.

So, my win is helping the blind and otherwise disabled with computing technology. In Open Source Land, it's whatever floats your boat.

I agree. Frankly I'm shocked about the low numbers reported. Surely the author of Python deserves more than $30K/year? I'm not a big fan of the coders behind the GTK+ code base. Could it be partly because the whole Gnome organization runs on about $500K/year? Maybe that doesn't buy very many good coders? Apache makes practically nothing. How is that a good thing? I had no idea that our collective generosity added up to so little. I mean, we seem to be able to put together a couple hundred million in small donations to elect president, so why can't we help out some of these organizations a bit more. I donated something like $50 last year to the FSF, and $100 to NVDA, the free screen reader for the blind. I figured that makes me a stingy SOB... gee a whole $150 in a year. And that was my most generous year of FOSS support ever. Still... don't we add up to a bit more than a few million?

The top earner, Mozilla Corp, is getting $300M/year from Google. So, combined, Mozilla is making something like $301M/year, assuming no other major cash sources exist. In short, Mozilla is rolling in cash, but they only have to report on the $1M. I would not be surprised to see several million in compensation per year to their top earner. How many other organizations on this list play similar tricks, having a private commercial side to make all the cash, while reporting as if they were poor starving do-gooders?