That should be the definition for apocalypse. :)

No ...

Ummm.. go ahead and uninstall your OS.

In a way it would be kind of nice, because at least I'd have a valid justification for my constant attempts to reinvent the wheel ...

I can imagine it, yes. I certainly wouldn't want to live in it though.

Easy to imagine if you're old enough, wasn't great though

Back in the old days, almost everything was proprietary including languages and IDEs - you would pay over a 1000 euros a year for your Delphi IDE, for any production-grade database, you would pay someone like Oracle for a database license, any middleware you would use, you would pay license fees for, and so it went. Becoming an expert at anything often meant going on courses since these tech was often not available for home-use to mess around with.

Only a few years ago, Microsoft was still following this model with its IDEs and C#, Oracle is still one foot in the old days suing Google for licensing fees even though the language was open-sourced decades ago.

In a world where everything is proprietary, you either build everything yourself or you pay for it. Luckily (most) companies have realised that by working together and sharing code, everyone wins.

Safe to assume, almost all of us wouldn't be here. Most nodes, in hashnode are open source topics. (Same holds true for stack overflow)

Running servers would be very expensive. Mainframes would thrive (vendors will make their stack compatible, and my not give a damn about other vendors).

Finding a Full Stack Dev in the said hypothetical world, would be same as finding an Architect in this world. The Idea of being a polyglot developer would be rare, if not absent.

Also, the emphasis of Programming Languages in the hypothetical world would be to run everywhere, even if it's not the most practical option. (Imagine C on the browser)

Most saddening fact would be, that development in general, would be vendor driven and not community driven. (The whole concept of community-driven-anything will be lost.)

Well it might be nice to not have the "church of Stallman" cultists ranting and raving "rah rah, fight the man" to deal with, or the "wah wah, it's trademarked so it's teh evilz" whackjobs .... it would be a wildly different landscape to deal with.

I mean no open source, no GCC... If Linus had gone ahead and built an OS, would it still have been a Unix-like? What compiler would he have ended up using? No Xfree86 as a X11R6 implementation, what would people have put atop it for a GUI if any? As a Unix-like without open source would it even have taken off since let's face it, without Linux the entire Unix "concept" would have continued its slide into obsolescence.

Which depending on your opinion of Unix and Posixisms in general might not have been a bad thing. Let's be honest, until Linux as a whole Unix was dying... a slow, agonizing, and frankly well deserved death. The ONLY people who gave a flying purple fish about Unix were back-room server geeks struggling to keep big iron relevant in the microcomputer age, and career educators long in the tooth and short on relevance.

Well, as you said, the internet wouldn't be like it is today. The base of the internet is the open source. Pd: Your post was very interesting and made me think a lot about the internet with no open source software 😂

There are two different questions here:

Can we imagine it? For most of us, yes, because it wasn't already a thing back then ;-) Si it'S easy to imagine something you experienced.

But I assume your question is more: Can you imagine going back to a world without open source? And then the answer is totally different, I couldn't believe such a huge step back could be made.

No of course not. The nature of information flow is to be free.

Not really, no.

Letʼs imagine a world around 1995 where open source hasnʼt happened. There was little Gergely and a friend of his. We used DOS (proprietary) to play (proprietary) games, and also used QBasic (proprietary) to write small programs. We shared the code between each other, and later with some other guys who also tried to learn programming.

We knew nothing about development. We never heard about open source (although we also havenʼt heard the term proprietary). Yet, we already did open source, as we shared our code without expecting -beer- chocolate in exchange.

No. Given the nature of a big part of humanity, I donʼt think a world without open source is possible. It might be labeled illegal, but it would totally exist.