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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.
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.
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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.