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RMS Accused Of Attempting Glibc Hostile Takeover
Bram Stolk sent a bit in thats been floating around lately where Ulrich Drepper, glibc maintainer announces the new version, and sidetracks to discuss an an RMS takeover attempt and how he feels about it. He raises several good points and I tend to agree with him. The FSF has done, and continues to do so much good, but more and more tension continues to grow between the extreme free speech faction and the more moderate folks. People have asked my opinion, and I'll just leave it by saying I don't prefix "Linux" with those 3 little letters and a slash even tho I've been asked.
"People have asked my opinion, and I'll just leave it by saying I don't prefix "Linux" with those 3 little letters and a slash even tho I've been asked."
Never mind that when I purchase or download a Linux version 70% or more of the included software is GNU. Right?
Wow, Rob. Colour me surprised
If you want to boot to a good OS for free in all it's connotations try the Linux kernel. If you wish to also be productive, your almost certain to be using GNU software. And even if you aren't, chances are that your kernel was compiled by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Linux sans GNU ? Please at least try to be serious.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
And you say yourself that's part of my freedom of speech. So there! :)
Actually, yes. It is your freedom. Now you're starting to get it. Anybody who fully believes that Freedom of speech includes the freedom to complain loudly about other's speech would certainly welcome you excercising your opinion.
Feels good to be free, doesn't it? Too bad few people can let go. The ones who haven't figure it out yet are the ones so tense, and ultimate the ones who want to shut the rest of us up.
GNU/Linux. Linux/GNU. Where'd that TCP stack come from again? *snicker*
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Just out of curiosity, are there any movements out there to rewrite all the GNU tools? I would think there would be a lot of people in favor of something, with all the pro-BSD license folks, and just people who generally think that having one, let say, socially challenged guy in charge of a lot of software is a bad idea.
It could even be GPL (although I think the BSD license is "freer"), but to tell you the truth, I think there would be a lot of benefit of moving beyond the FSF. To quote the movie Lawrence of Arabia:
Feisal: The world is delighted at the picture of Damascus liberated by the Arab army.
Allenby: Led, may I remind you, sir, by a British-serving officer.
Feisal: Ah yes. But then Aurens [Lawrence] is a sword with two edges. We are equally glad to be rid of him, are we not?
Allenby: I thought I was a hard man, sir.
It's almost always better when revolutionaries die in the revolution.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The main problem with communism and free software is that, in order to get get to the blissful anarchy that Marx promises, you need a period of totalitarian management to restructure from the existing system to the new one. Unfortunately, absolute power corrupts asolutely, and you're stuck with a totalitarian system that doesn't want to give up.
This really rears its ugly head when the philosophy starts to expand. As both communism and free software started to catch on, the bigger proponents of the philosophy would rather expand the power of their own totalitarian regimes rather than help establish autonomous regimes. In the eyes of Moscow, for example, the Ukraine Socialist Republic was good, but the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic was better (it wasn't until later that they learned of the advantages of puppet states). And the same is true with the GNU: Instead of presenting themselves and their liscencing scheme as one out of a list of alternatives, they'd rather all free software be written under the GPL.
Fortunately, when all is said and done, we're talking about an operating system and not a system of government. No matter how much people like Stallman bitch and moan, dissenting voices never have to worry about the GNU/KGB descending upon them and the Coders' Army won't send in the tanks to prevent code forking. So when all is said and done, short of brainwashing, people are still perfectly capable of making up their own mind about what they want to write or run, Which is good, because I find some GNU tools to be a pain to learn...
At any rate, in the game of Axis & Allies that is the OS war, we'll call Microsoft facist Germany, GNU will be the Soviet Union, and for the role of the political moderates (relatively speaking), we have corporations like IBM and RedHat as the US and the UK. Now all we need is somebody to play Japan...
Oh, yeah, Apple. Duh...
So let me get this straight: some guy accuses RMS of "hostile takeover" of a *GNU* project. This guy makes some strong claims in his article. He uses terms like "conspiracy", "embrace and extend", "stab in the back", etc. Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence... and he offers none. There are only two pieces of information in the article:
1) Steering Comittee was formed so that one person (the whining guy) does not have complete control over the project
2) glibc license was changed from LGPL 2.0 to LGPL 2.1.
And this is supposed to be bad how? How does that justify the claim that RMS is a "control freak"? Everything else in the article is pure rhetoric without even a shed of evidence.
People, please, before you do your usual "some guy good, RMS bad" knee-jerk reaction read the damn article and think. glibc is GNU libc, it is not a one man's project. It sounds to me like this guy is a control freak -- he started whining after he realized that other people have a say in the project development. So yeah, this entire article is a troll.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Linus did not choose the name `Linux'. Linus chose the name `Freax' and the guy running the funet.fi archive decided that was a horrible name and renamed the kernel for him.
People gathered around this new operating system that was being written from scratch, and they wrote piles of tools that were missing for this new Linux thing. Many tools came from GNU, yes, but many others were assembled and contributed by many people specifically to make Linux run.
It is funny how history is rewritten these days. If you ask the people who were around rms on the early days of Linux, you will see that they tell a story from different angles: `Do not work on Linux, work on the Hurd, anything else is a waste of time'. At least this is the story as told by Donald and now Ulrich.