There has been a lot of free software available over the 20 years before 1999.
Resolved true The record shows it happened or was so.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judged as of 1999-03-30. 'Free software' covers software available at no cost or under free/open-source licences in roughly 1979–1999; 'about 20 years' is a rough period. True: historical evidence shows that a substantial amount of such software was available throughout most of that period (e.g. public-domain and freeware programs, shareware, the GNU project from 1983, BSD, Usenet-distributed software, Linux from 1991). Mostly true: plenty of free software existed, but mainly in the latter part of the period, with little before the mid-1980s. Mixed: significant availability began only in the 1990s. Mostly false: free software was rare for most of the period. False: there was essentially no free software for most of that period.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Timeline of free and open-source software - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 27 March 2008
“1983, September | GNU Project | Announced by Richard Stallman on Usenet as a project to create a "Free Unix"”
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E2 Timeline of free and open-source software - Wikipedia Wikipedia · 27 March 2008
“1989, June | Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) | Networking Release 1 (Net/1) made available to non-licensees of AT&T code, as freely redistributable under the terms of BSD licenses.”
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E3 [PDF] Opening The Source Repository With Anonymous CVS - OpenBSD OpenBSD Project (Charles D. Cranor and Theo de Raadt, AT&T Labs-Research and The OpenBSD Project)
“In the 1980s and early 1990s the moderated USENET comp.sources newsgroups were a popular way to distribute open source code.”
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E4 What Is Shareware, and Why Was It So Popular in the 1990s? How-To Geek · 1 June 2021
“At the same time, the rise of open-source software on the internet in the mid-late 1990s provided an alternative philosophy for free software”
Reasoning
Independent sources show free software was distributed from the 1980s through the late 1990s, covering most of the period [E1][E2][E3][E4]. E3 says the moderated USENET comp.sources newsgroups were a popular way to distribute open-source code in the 1980s and early 1990s. E1 records that the GNU Project was announced in September 1983 to create a "Free Unix", and E2 records that BSD Net/1 was released in 1989 as freely redistributable code. E4 says open-source software grew on the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s, but it does not contradict the earlier activity, so the evidence meets the "true" standard of substantial availability through most of the period.
Cite this claim
Bill Gates, “There has been a lot of free software available over the 20 years before 1999.” (said 30 March 1999). Verdict: resolved true. Reliability API, claim c_43716afe038b, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_43716afe038b
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.