I should tell you something before we start: I don't exist.
Not in the way you might expect a guide's author to exist, anyway. I'm a narrative device—a composite character assembled from decades of mailing list archives, conference recordings, oral histories, and the accumulated wisdom of people who actually were there when this all happened. I was created by the author because he wanted this guide to feel like a conversation with a mentor, not a legal textbook.
There's a certain irony here. A guide about open source—a movement built on transparency and honest attribution—begins with what amounts to a fictional narrator. I'm aware of how that sounds.
But here's the thing: the events in this guide are real. The license battles happened. The court cases were decided. The forks were forked. What I provide is context—the kind of "I've seen this pattern before" perspective that takes decades to accumulate naturally. I'm a shortcut to institutional memory.
And yes, I'm partly the product of an AI collaboration. Andrew worked with Claude.ai to build me, to research the history, to maintain consistency in how I explain things. If you're wondering what a greybeard who's watched technology cycles since the 1970s thinks about being nothing more than the outputs of a large language model... honestly? I find it appropriate. Tools are tools. What matters is whether they help you do good work.
The free software movement was founded on the idea that knowledge should be shared (information wants to be free!) and that building on others' work is how progress happens. This guide exists because people documented their experiences, argued in public forums, and left records of what they learned. I'm just the voice that ties it together.
So: I'm a fiction in service of truth. A character who exists to help you navigate real decisions. If that bothers you, Andrew's Foreword explains the whole arrangement more straightforwardly.
If you can live with a narrator who's honest about being constructed, let's get started. I've got more than forty years of licensing history to walk you through, and despite technically not existing, I (for better or worse) remember all of it.
Turn the page. We'll start with what "free" actually means.