Now,
with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was
suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the
time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a
commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as
a business: Prime Time Freeware.
Such commercial exploitation was completely within the
confines of the free software agenda. "When we speak of
free software, we are referring to freedom, not price,"
advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late
1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple
mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free
as in free speech."
For the most part, businesses ignored Stallman's
entreaties. Still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom
associated with free software was the same freedom
associated with free markets. Take software ownership
out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation
where even the smallest software company was free to
compete against the IBMs and DECs of the world.
One of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept
was Michael Tiemann, a software programmer and graduate
student at Stanford University.
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