Top 10 Most Important Tech People of the Decade

KarmaWhore writes "For it's 10th anniversary Network Computing has put together what they consider to be the top ten people of the decade. Linus is number three. Gates is number two. " I dunno - lists like this are certainly useless - but it's always a fun debate.

Comments

RMS is not there

[BlowCat]

Where would Linux be without GCC and GNU Libc?

Re:RMS is not there

[cyber-vandal]

That's because Linus is a personable Scandinavian, whereas RMS, for all his genius and talent, is quite a scary human being (like all true fanatics). This is a media list, not a geek list.

Re:GNU and Linux depend on each other

[cburley]

My best argument for this is that people were using linux before it came with GNU stuff. People weren't using GNU before it came with Linux

If that's your "best argument", you're neck-deep in buffalo dung, my friend, for that argument is exactly backwards.

Many of us were not only working on GNU software before Linux, we were using it, on a reasonably wide variety of underlying kernels -- SunOS, AIX (or whatever ran on RS/6000's in those days), and so on.

And I'm pretty sure when I started running Linux 0.96pl2 or whatever patch level it was, it already came with GNU utilities.

If there was indeed a time when Linux came without GNU stuff, the number of people using it was probably less than .1% of the number of people who were already using GNU software without the Linux kernel running underneath!

Until people use GNU/Hurds as much as Linux.. I'm calling it Linux.

Not that I insist you change your mind now that you've been given a clue about GNU/Linux history...but you might want to consider either calling it GNU/Linux sooner, or maybe when (or if) people use Linux with non-GNU tools in greater numbers (and this has long been "threatened", anyway)...

...or you might consider waiting to call it GNU/Linux until after we see whether the FSF calls their future OS "GNU/Hurd" or simply "The Hurd".

If the FSF uses "Hurd" to denote both the kernel and the OS, that certainly suggests it's okay to use "Linux" to denote the whole GNU+Linux(+otherstuff) OS. But if they call it "GNU/Hurd", they'll be risking suggesting that "Hurd" is no more a creation of Project GNU (or the FSF) than is Linux, as well as implying a useful system could be put together out of the Hurd kernel plus non-GNU utilities (and these are, respectively, false and true), which might be too risky for them. (Then again, maybe the GNU toolchain will be considered ubiquitous by the time the Hurd gets widespread usage?)

In the meantime, the fact that RMS couldn't get through a slashdot interview (or response), in which he continued his attempts to promote the "GNU/Linux" name on the basis that honesty in naming is important, without himself resorting to "name games" to smear George W. Bush, calling him by the invented nickname "shrub", strongly suggests that RMS doesn't have sufficient moral authority to persuade anyone to use "GNU/Linux" over "Linux", even if he has many other good arguments for such a choice.

But, in case I have any moral authority (which does not seem likely to me), I do prefer "GNU/Linux" to denote the class of OS that combines the Linux kernel with GCC, glibc, and other GNU utilities, without denoting anything about a windowing system, graphics capabilities, or all that much about networking, etc., FWIW. And I still wish, or recommend, that Linus would decide to wean Linux off its dependency on GCC, which, last I checked, was quite excessive, leading to too many cases where Linux depends on being compiled by a particular version of GCC, and making it harder for a true non-GNU Linux OS to develop.