When they supported the legislation called "Net Neutrality" which attempted to supplant the concept of actual net neutrality with some quasi government control of the internet. It would've enabled massive censorship on the internet, something that we've seen is a very very bad thing.
It was over for me when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet.
The EFF had previously been a client of mine so I was somewhat familiar with how things worked and basically once Gilmore was out, it went downhill.
They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.
My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.
I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.
Its a bit more recent than 25 years, probably 2003-2005 maybe.
When I was a young "computer nerd" who went off to college we had a pretty decent CS program but it was awfully dusty to those not into it. I think there were maybe 5-10 "great" CS programs in the US, now major cities have 2-5 real "learn to code" programs outside of colleges.
In 96, a "programmer" could make decent money but it was defo not a money printing machine.
You would've had the privilege of reading the source with BSD too, but the GPL prevents a variety of things from happening so its not as free as the BSD License.
If you want to read into something - he was bullied into using the GPL and not the BSD license.
> It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as possible. On this metric, yes BSD would have been a superior choice.
You basically made the point on why using the BSD license would've been superior...
There are a lot of things the GPL prevents and Carmack is spot on about it.