The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.

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[–] Tja@programming.dev 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not only that: it was big enough to get mad at 40 years ago already.

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

40 years ago was 1985.

The first version of Microsoft Windows was released at that time, as an GUI overlay of MS-DOS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows

MS-DOS was released in 1981 as a corporate locked down OS, that he was aggressively pushing to lock down the PC market.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS

At the same time HP, IBM, and other early computing megacorps were pushing their own locked down OS's that were partially built off the free software work of the universities.

One example is HP-UX, which was released in 1984 and was a proprietary implementation of Unix System V, which itself was a commercial product from AT&T. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V

Things were extremely expensive and locked down back then, and we were just getting to the point where computers were becoming common in people's homes. Most decently funded schools had dedicated computer labs at this point.