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RMS Replies to "The Stallman Factor"
Ryan Amos writes "RMS has replied to the article "The Stallman Factor," as
posted on Slashdot about a week ago. In specific, his replies deal with the University of Texas SIGLinux naming fiasco and Bitkeeper. As always with RMS, an interesting read."
"the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece"
Stallman convieniently ignores the contributions made by X11, the BSD people and the many others who have worked to create the operating system I conveniently call "Linux".
This mad grasp for recognition cheapens all the other good work that the FSF and the GNU project have done.
His whole rant about Bitkeeper is just wrong. According to Linus himself you DO NOT need bitkeeper to track kernel changes. Lnus has made every effort to make life easy for non bitkeeper users, in fact, several top level contributers don't bother with it and send the old style patches.
Why do so many people agree RMS' growing insanity?
He claims he wants the GNU project to "have it's due". Well, fine. The GPL requires this "due" to be part of every piece of GPL'd source--it's the license, it's right there, and it GIVES CREDIT to the GNU project and it's authors. No one has stripped the GPL headers off of GPL code--it's all right there, giving CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE.
So why is RMS griping? Why the continual whine for "GNU/Linux"? What about other GPL-ed projects that use GNU code...why is he not crusading to have GNU/ appended to those? Is it only because Linux itself (the kernel) is a "big name" with "big prestige"? Please RMS, grow the hell up. Spend less time whining about "GNU/Linux" and more time working on HURD--then you can call it whatever the heck you want. Linux is NOT your project.
RMS is once again changing the rules on a whim. GPL'd code by NATURE provides the recognition to the original authors. It does NOT command people to prepend "GNU/" to everything. RMS is changing the rules, just like he did with TrollTech ("Ok folks...you've gone GPL, but now you must apologise..."). Why does RMS feel that people can't call their projects whatever they like? Last I checked, Linux is Linus Torvald's brainchild. He started the project, he wrote the code, and HE GETS TO NAME IT WHATEVER HE WANTS.
As for RMS browbeating a user's group...all I can say is "Bra-VO RMS...you really showed those amateurs, newbies and hobbyists a thing-or-two. How DARE they name their user's group without your permission?!" And that's my point. RMS goes out of his way to be an ass towards a group of people that are ostensibly FANS of his...they wanted him to speak. He responded with stupid dogma about the name of their user's group. Way to go RMS, way to win converts. Sheesh.
He was trying to get the hurd working - and he's still working on it.
He out-right lies in this one where he says that Linus insisted on calling it Linux, etc. Linus didn't even name the silly thing, the guy who ran the FTP site did!
He also seems to forget little things like X that make a modern desktop possible. His arguements are specious and silly - as is he most of the time.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
i just read the stallman response.
every time i read something from him i get the same respone. he first comes out as abrasive irritating and i say to myself 'shut the fuck up'. but the further i read the more i agree with his postion. why this dual reaction? maybe because both are true.
i think he is taking the GNU/Linux a little far. but i tend to agree with his overall position.
my feelings on the first part of his response is that his position could be better furthered 'education'the people at the talks. it feels to me with this point he is missing the opportunity to 'sread the word'.
that's just my 2 cents worth
Speaking as someone who was there when the whole "Linux experience" started, I can categorically state that Linus made no such statement trying to lock GNU out of any credit for anything - the issue simply never came up as far as I remember.
At that time, anyone could download the GNU software and build it, port it, or whatever on their OS, and it was a logical choice to port GNU software to Linux. But GNU wasn't the only contributor to Linux - there were significant efforts to port BSD utilities and other software to Linux, as well as lots of folks writing software from scratch or porting it from other systems - I myself wrote a curses, cron, and at implementation from scratch and submitted them for inclusion in Linux. And that's not even mentioning Wine, XFree86, and a host of other systems, utilities, and applications that were either written for or ported to Linux.
For RMS to make such a statement that Linux is based primarily on GNU software is not only silly, but smacks of the highest level of egotism. It seems as if RMS is jealous of the popularity and publicity that Linux (and Linus) has gotten, and wants a part of that limelight. This is just as silly as insisting that every single project or OS that uses GNU software proclaim that fact. Why isn't RMS out shouting to the masses that anyone who uses GNU software is required to give GNU credit, instead of just ranting about Linux?
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
You give RMS way too much credit.
I was using free software back in 1982, primarily Ward Christensen's Modem7 but other programs as well. This continued on through my later years playing with Commodore computers... typing in programs published in Compute, Compute's Gazette, RUN and so forth. A few years later I bought Fred Fish collection floppies for my Amiga and had a wealth of additional free programs to use.
Later in '92 I begun to use Linux. It wasn't until then, well actually probably more like six months after I started to use Linux, that I even heard of GNU or Richard Stallman. You see, I was so used to free software that I never even bothered to read the license agreement for Linux.
So that's 10 years of my using, contributing, and being involved in a free software community without the name of Richard Stallman ever appearing.
Now maybe it's true that Linux wouldn't have come about without gcc. Maybe it would have been different, hard to say.
But don't think for a minute that BSD wouldn't have fought AT&T to gain redistributable rights. On this point you give RMS entirely too much credit.
The vision of free software existed before RMS, it existed in parallel with RMS, and it exists despite RMS. RMS's vision is really quite meaningless in the whole big world of free software. Rather, if anything, it has been damaging to the cause with his anti-commercialism.
The only reason we even talk about the GPL today is because a man by the name of Linus Torvalds made the decision to release Linux under that license. If he had not, GNU would be irrelevant. Without that kernel there would be no OS, there would be no distribution that was nearly entirely based off of GNU pieces. Without that kernel no further work would have proceeded on GNU projects. Without the popularity given to GNU from that kernel, RMS would now be a small footnote on a web page somewhere.
It's a chicken and egg scenario. Both are dependent upon on another.
Please don't feed the egos.
Why can't we be like mechanical engineers, or doctors, who don't go arround destroying their own trade?
As a mechanical engineer (graduate, not P.Eng) I think Open source will make programmers more like mechanical engineers and doctors.
Every bit of work I do is open, my calculations, notes, references, articles, papers, all of it.
You can read books, you can look at the same things, I spend a large amount of my time explaining what I did and how I did it to people, my boss, coworkers and customers.
People don't pay me for this calculation, they don't pay me for this academic paper, they generally don't even pay for a generic report I would make.
What they DO pay for is the answer to their question/problem. Like a doctor or lawyer you come bringing a problem, and we solve it for a fee.
It can be a legal document, a spoken explanation, an operation, a physical product, or just advice.
I know many programmers who just solve problems for people, they make good money (like any professional) and don't have to hide, so what if they write it in PHP and give it away, the person ended up with their problem solved, the programmer got paid.
As programming problems get more and more complex you'll get more programmers to do more customization and trouble shooting, making solutions for customers, rather then generic tools.
In other words, you would like the technical aspects of kernel development to be dictated by political concerns, rather than technical ones. That's the kind of thinking that suits RMS and PHBs, not kernel developers.
He's already stated that he will use a free alternative which is as good as BitKeeper. Should Linus have to put the kernel on hold and develop such a thing, just to please RMS?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Not at all, but then, if Microsoft wrote Visual Studio and licensed it to you, then they would be within their rights to ask you to do so. You, of course, could always refuse to accept the license and use something else.
To be honest, the main statement I was disagreeing with was this:
GNU's contribution certainly isn't enough to deserve equal mention in the name of the operating system.
Well, IMHO, "Linux" isn't actually a very good name for the operating system that the majority of the readership of this site uses. GNU isn't much better, given things like GNOME, KDE, XFree86, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org also contribute massively to it, but I do agree with RMS that it's important that GNU and the FSF receive some credit.
That said, in conversation, I'll usually use "Linux" because it's a convenient shorthand, when most (if not all) of my peers know exactly what I am referring to.
--
So, you say the number of service provider coders grossly outnumber the code-for-sale coders. I have no numbers available to contest that, so I'll believe you for now -- I hope you can provide some reference, though?
That still does not mean that there is no place for code-for-sale coders. I work in a hardware development company, and we use a hundred or so software tools to do our job. A good percentage of them are *not* tools that solve the same problem and just need to be repatched for a new OS. They are tools that solve very specific problems without which we wouldn't exist.
To create these tools, a very large number of talented software developers are needed to work for many years. My question to you is -- where do these people fit into your definition of the profession? If these tools can not be produced to be sold, how can they be created in the first place? Not every company can afford to hire an army of programmers to provide this service to us!
I guess my view of the software industry is that there are two professions -- one that provides the service, such as yourself, and those that create software tools and sell them. I don't see how the latter group sets back IT 20 years -- they are needed, and wihtout them there would be a void in other industries that depend on them!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
You make an important point here about when and why we would choose to use a compound name for something that "looks like" one object. More specific names are not used merely because they exist, but because their use helps distinguish or disambiguate among alternatives.
The irony here is that one reason why GNU/Linux probably sounds wrong is precisely because there isn't much need to distinguish that variant from the others, since they are essentially not as well known. It is precisely because the GNU toolset is by far the most common one to be used with Linux that it will be tough to get anybody to use the term GNU/Linux. Now, if using Linux with a BSD-derived (or Solaris-derived or whatever) toolset became more popular, then you'd have a chance for ambiguity, and very possibly you'd use a compound term of some kind.
An additional problem, though, is that GNU/Linux will always seem clunky because it does not follow usual conventions for compounding. In particular, if you show this to the average person the street, I'd expect a number of them to think that whatever it was you were talking about was *either* GNU *or* Linux. Stallman clearly doesn't mean this, however. The problem is that the term you could use ("GNU Linux") emphatically makes GNU the "adjective" (specifier if you're that kind of person) that modifies the meaning of whatever Linux is. I don't think that is what the FSF would like people to think, either. But I'm pretty sure that BSD Linux and GNU Linux (for example) are the terms people would use to make the distinction between two systems with the obvious (to a hacker) properties. Fighting that is going to be very tough.
An additional real problem with the GNU/Linux formulation is that it suffers from what I'll call the "hyphenation problem". We all know married couples who, instead of keeping separate names or having one take the name of the other, choose to hyphenate their names. So far, so good. But we also know that this solution to solving an identity problem really only works for one generation. If Montgomery-Smith marries Johnson-Laird, then things go down hill pretty fast if they want to hyphenate. A similar problem happens with any system that relies on Linux, a GNU toolset, XFree86, and some substantial bundle of applications and desktop stuff (like KDE or Gnome). At one level, you could see how mentioning them all could be useful in a few contexts, but in practice, nobody is going to do this. In this particular case, people probably choose to mention only that which cannot be assumed as background. So if you mention "Gnome", it's not very likely (yet) that you're running on anything other than XFree86. It's possible that you could be using BSD rather than Linux. The tools used to compile the thing and/or the shell used are very possibly not relevent in context. So, here, you can predict that people will talk about Linux Gnome or BSD Gnome or something similar *if* they choose to mention the kernel at all.
To wrap this up, I think the big problem is that even if you agreed with RMS on principle, you'd be fighting the language and its speakers. In the end, I don't see how this is going to work out happily for anybody with a specific agenda that conflicts with how natural languages work.
Babar
Wether people choose to say "GNU/Linux" or just "Linux", it seems to me that RMS's campaign for the GNU/Linux name is having the desired effect. The very fact that it inflames so many passionate discussions puts GNU in the forefront of people's conciousness - whether they go along with the name or not. It's really not the name that's important. If we take RMS's words at face value, the reason he wants people to use the name is to make people conscious of the free software philosophy. The more people rail about whether the name should be GNU/Linux or Linux, the more successful RMS's campaign becomes.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
They did not add the OS, they added the kernel. Big difference. Remove all of the GNU tools and what can you do with the kernel?? What shell would you use??
If the FSF had really been like M$, they would have sold the GNU tools to pay for HURD development and released the Hurd as "Linux XP".
The kernel != the OS. If God makes the body, and the Devil makes the feet, do we worship the devil for creating man?? If GOD makes the body and the devil the brain??
Linux the kernel would not have been born without the FSF. Their history of internet development, their principles of shared source, and their guiding principles have kept Linux on track. Without the FSF Linux would probably be lockedaway in a room at IBM even had it managed to get finished.
To Stallman this becomes bigger than it needs to be because Linus has no moral center when it comes to the world of Proprietary software. This is most likely because he never lived in a world where software was free.
The environmentalist looks at a subdivision and says "I wonder if anybody remembers when this was all just open land..." Stallman remembers when it was all just information, free and open.
"Linux is the kernel. Redhat is a distribution, GNU is a software house. How hard are these to understand?"
The stupidity of this statement lies in the fact that you have incorrectly id'ed the kernel as the OS. I assume that you consider yourself technically literate, so why do you confuse the kernel with the OS?? So continue to lionize Torvalds while demonizing Stallman if you must, but time will tell who was the true champion of the cause.
And for all of the "GNU couldn't exist without Linux" people out there, without "gcc" Linux couldn't compile. How much success could Torvalds had without a C compiler?? Glibc, BASH, etc... So all the GNU did was produce the necessary tools, and this distracted them from creating a next generation kernel. Meanwhile some guy does a this-generation Monolithic kernel faster (of course) and he's the great hero of the day.
There are two sides to every story, but don't even know one of them.
~Hammy
...towards projects that don't happen to be his pet-projects. I mean, he seems to be hostile towards Linux (and Linus). It seems to me that he's annoyed by the fact that Linux came along and stole the thunder that was reserved for his pet-project: HURD. Well, Stallman and FSF has no-one but themselves to blame. They have been working on HURD for as long as I can remember, and it's still unfinished!
Another example is KDE. There used to be genuine reason for him to be annoyed, but those reasons have been corrected. KDE is GPL-compliant. Yet he seems to be rather hostile towards KDE. His biased towards Gnome (the official GNU Desktop) is rather obvious.
It seems to me that he's negative towards software-projects that compete with official GNU-projects (Linux vs. HURD, KDE vs. Gnome). One would think that RMS would be happy when GPL-software gets more popular, but his ego seems to get in the way. He wants HIS projects to succeed, not some other projects. And if he can't beat that other project, he then insists that The Mark of GNU must be placed on that project (Linux is beating HURD, so he insists that Linux gets named GNU/Linux). I bet if KDE started to show sings of killing Gnome, RMS would insist that KDE get's renamed to GDE (GNU Desktop Environment) or something similar.
As to the naming of Linux... I will keep on calling it "Linux", thank you very much. If I need to separate the kernel from the OS, I will talk about "The Linux Kernel". Nothing in the GPL suggests that it must be named after the GNU-project. I might have started to call it GNU/Linux, but RMS's foaming-at-the-mouth attitude has turned me away from his suggestions.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I can't see why the Linux kernel is not using CVS.
Technically, could someone point out the reasons?
Mozilla is far larger I believe than the Linux kernel, has a vast array of CVS hookups readily available for coordinating even the most complex relationships with developers.
Has Linus ever stated exactly the technical details of why cvs is not used? I know Linux many times uses and does things according to his preference, with debatable excuses for using a particular algorithm or code for one thing, or a particular piece of software for development.
Exactly what preferences did he use personally to apply the use of Bitkeeper over CVS?
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Nobody would argue that it's entirely reasonable for Coca-cola to keep their formula secret. If anybody could manufacture Coke, what would you need Coca-cola for?
Coca-cola is more a trademark than anything else. Most of what goes into Coke has to be disclosed on the can, and the ~100 year old recipe certanly doesn't have any patent protection. The whole secrecy thing is mostly a marketing ploy. Anybody with the right equipment and know-how can manufacture Coke, what they need Coca-cola for is the right to market their product under their name and not as yet another off-brand cola.
Similarly, if anybody could manufacture (i.e., compile) my software product, then what would you need me for?
Anybody can copy your binary. The fact that Microsoft discloses the source code to Windows to some major customers and some universities doesn't threaten their business, it's easier to burn an iso of their retail CD than build it yourself--and distributing the source would be just as illegal as distributing the binary.
--
Benjamin Coates
I often wonder about Stallman's real beef with Linux when it is not called Gnu/Linux. I know people are going to mod this as flamebait, troll, or whatever, but it is the truth:
BSD contains the same number of official GNU tools that Linux does, as do many proprietary Unices. So, what separates Linux is its adoption of the GPL for the EULA of the kernel itself. So I think that Stallman is being a little unfair to insist that people call it GNU-Linux (next will we call it GNU-BSD, GNU-Solaris, etc?).
The other point is that GNU has semi-officially adopted the Linux kernel (seemingly as a temporary solution while developing HURD) as much as things went the other way.
I really like to hear Stallman's thoughts on the philosophy of the GPL--I think that they are sound. Too bad he had to open his mouth and damage his credibility this way...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Nope, no difference. The idea that the kernel is not the OS is a myth passed around in recent years without any explanation; it's just assumed that if you say it loud and often it will become true. It doesn't.
The origin of this myth seems to be the idea that in a sea of API's, the ones exported by the kernel are just nothing special, the whole ensemble is the OS. This is certainly MS's argument in court.
Of course, it doen't hold water. The OS is the kernel for the simple reason that if you remove it nothing else works. The kernel sits astride the OS/User barrier and controls all access across it in a way no other API does. What other part of what you call the OS can you say that of?
What is it that you say distinguishes a non-kernel OS component from a non-kernel, non-OS component, the touch of the magic finger of RMS?
Remove all of the GNU tools and what can you do with the kernel??
Bad news for you on this one. I program in Forth on my Linux machine at home and I don't need any GNU tools to do so. I don't link to any libraries and I only access even IO through the kernel. I wrote the Forth compiler myself using NASM and ald for debugging; neither are GNU tools.
In 25 years of programming I've never written a C or C++ program, although of course I have compiled them. I use Perl (not GNU), Forth (not GNU), and PHP (not GNU) for almost all my work now. Not because I'm avoiding GNU tools (I sometimes use Sed) but I just don't need them. Even programs like "uniq", "chmod" and "ls" have started to be replaced by my own Forth version on my system, just for the practice.
If GNU is part of the OS how could this possibly be? How can I write fully functioning programs without using GNU components, and why is it I can't do that with the kernel missing? It's almost as if the GNU stuff was just a bunch of apps!
What shell would you use??
Korn?
A Linux system always includes GNU tools, just as it always includes TeX (not GNU), which I use for all my document production now, from letters to setting my Forth code and comment blocks neatly onto pages for listing. Does this mean that it's now Knuth/GNU/Linux?
If the FSF had really been like M$, they would have sold the GNU tools to pay for HURD development and released the Hurd as "Linux XP".
Lack of money was not the problem for Hurd, it was lack of talent in the sense that no talent on Earth would have been enough to take it out of the realm of myth in any realistic timescale.
The kernel != the OS. If God makes the body, and the Devil makes the feet, do we worship the devil for creating man?? If GOD makes the body and the devil the brain??
This is the first time I've seen fantasy beings invoked as an argument in CS! I'll ignore it and hope you've sobered up by the time you read this.
Linux the kernel would not have been born without the FSF.
This is true. But then it's true that GNU would not have existed without Unix and Bell Labs. So we're up to "BellLabs/Knuth/GNU/Linux" now. That's progress: everyone's getting their due credit.
Without the FSF Linux would probably be lockedaway in a room at IBM even had it managed to get finished.
True. But it assumes that nothing else would have taken its place. Like BSD, for example. GNU was used, but it didn't have to be.
To Stallman this becomes bigger than it needs to be because Linus has no moral center when it comes to the world of Proprietary software.
This is also almost true. I think that actually it becomes bigger to RMS because he's lost all sense of proportion on the subject, but Linus is definitely ethically adrift.
The stupidity of this statement lies in the fact that you have incorrectly id'ed the kernel as the OS.
There is no evidence that I have seen, other than what passes for it in MS's court cases, that there is anything outside of the kernel which is part of the OS. Simply waving at some programs and saying "that's OS" and others and saying "that's an application" is not good enough. In fact it is bullshit.
I assume that you consider yourself technically literate, so why do you confuse the kernel with the OS??
I am clearly more technically literate than yourself and less prone to be blinded by buzzwords that have no meaning.
So continue to lionize Torvalds while demonizing Stallman if you must,
It's becoming increasingly clear that both are arseholes of the highest order. Clearly, being an arsehole doesn't get in the way of technical ability.
but time will tell who was the true champion of the cause.
Well, Stallman is of course. At least he was but his incredible ability to annoy those who would otherwise support him, apparently to feed his ego, is undermining that cause. Fatally if he continues in this way.
And for all of the "GNU couldn't exist without Linux" people out there,
All two of them...
without "gcc" Linux couldn't compile.
Circular logic. Linux is written for gcc, including some bugs and quirks. If gcc had not existed then it would have been written for and around some other compiler.
So all the GNU did was produce the necessary tools, and this distracted them from creating a next generation kernel.
You sad, sad man. Saint Stallman slaving away at these tools all day thinking "I wish I could get on with my next generation kernel, but that bastard Torvalds just won't let the pressure up for a new version of AWK".
The fact that the majority of the GNU tools were in place when Linus started rather undermines this particular work of fiction.
Meanwhile some guy does a this-generation Monolithic kernel faster (of course) and he's the great hero of the day.
Of course you are using loaded language. It's not at all clear that the micro-kernel is "next-generation" as opposed to "dead-end waste of time". If we'd waited for Hurd Unix would be dead and there would be no machines running any GNU tools anywhere.
There are two sides to every story, but don't even know one of them.
I know many sides to this story and I've been involved in the industry long enough to have seen how stories grow and develop into myths and legends with only a passing resemblance to the original truth. The whole Hurd thing has been a fiasco from start to the present day. Have you used it? Do you actually know anyone that has? Do you know when it will be ready for running OpenOffice on?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"