Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market

alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity. When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority,' and also criticized Stallman's ideas as 'belonging to the past' where there were no software 'business possibilities.'"

Comments

Re:bringing down companies that create wealth

[TemporalBeing]

Tetris was originally designed as a training tool for late Soviet-era transport interests. The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.

This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry. Obviously you didn't see the BBC documentary on Tetris (it's available on YouTube - can't provide a link right now). Alex created it as a variant of a popular board game with a couple extra twists according to the documentary. It then started selling, and only later did the USSR find out about it - after it had already swept through the USSR and other countries wanted to buy it. The USSR's software group ended up sole-sourcing the market to Nintendo through some interesting twists, which through Atari for a spin as they had already pumped a lot of money into their own version of Tetris since they thought they had licensed it for the PC. Quite a good documentary.