this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
93 points (91.9% liked)
Open Source
31072 readers
790 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass.
It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline “First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known.”
Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said by phone, “The world we live in now, with app stores and software invented in someone’s garage, is a credit to Goetz’s vision, his scientific innovation and dogged persistence.”
“I had the opportunity to tell the world why IBM’s unbundling was a godsend for the user community,” he wrote in 2002 in a two-part memoir published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Annals of the History of Computing.
His mother, Rose (Friedman) Goetz, worked at the store and, after her husband’s death, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.
Mr. Goetz was inducted into the Mainframe Hall of Fame, which cited him as the “father of third-party software.” In 2007, Computerworld named him an “unsung innovator” of the computer industry.
The original article contains 1,188 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!