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Dennis Ritchie Interviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Unix.se has published an interview with Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C, co-creator of Unix)." Not very technical, but Dennis shares his thoughts on GNU, kernel design, and more.
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Back in the "good old days", operating systems weren't portable, so you were locked in from the start.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
What would the world be without gnu? Shudder.
I am typing this on a windows2000 box now but I have apache, perl, devc++, cygwin, and tlc running. Would these utilities be free today if Gnu or Linux never was born? I don't think so.
We would just have Visual Studio for an expensive price. VC or VB take your pick.
Free Software is great and it opens up the market and provides a scene. Especially if you do not have two dimes to rub together.
http://saveie6.com/
I would have expected an interview with him about how great he is, how great his invention C is, etc. However, I was really amazed. He seems rather low key and does not seem to have that superiority complex that plagues some idividuals. He seems like a human being with an interest in computers. I like this. It is a welcome read after listening to my professors make fun of people with their heads on tripods, when they should look in the mirror cause they have the biggest heads on the most massive tripods ever seen.
I would have liked to see longer answers and in more detail to some of his questions. Although, I can say tersness can be a desired trait.
Reserved Word.
Ok, the guy is venerated by many and was behind Unix, the C language etc, but does he really have anything relevant to say about what is going on in the world today. Of course we will never know if the interviewers only ask a few questions and settle for short, vague answers. His comments left me with no new understanding of anything... from the interview it seems as though he hasn't really been doing anything at all. He said just enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. In particular I disagree with his view of free software. Of course they had to reinvent the wheel on a lot of things to get Linux/freeBSD or any free software going. All the stuff that wasn't free was copyrighted. We are getting to the point now that there is a free foundation for sofware upon which developers can build more innovative things(not that there was a complete lack of innovation to begin with). In any event, Linux couldn't be en-vogue forever, but that doesn't mean it's not good. People shouldn't bash a good thing just because they're tired of hearing about it.
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Yes, of course, but not as many as you might think. Lots of people seem to miss this point, even Ritchie - when Stallman set out on the GNU project, his aim was not to build a gee-whiz cutting edge computer system, it was to produce free software that would be very useful to people. At the time, everybody used UNIX, so that's what it made sense to "make free". Also, there was a lot of experience with UNIX systems, and communications wasn't as good back then as it is now, so the modularity of UNIX meant the work could easily be split into various teams.
Even though the driving force was a desire for software freedom rather than cool features, Linux and the rest of the GNU system today have all kinds of stuff that wasn't in the old UNIX systems. In fact, stuff like /proc was stolen directly from Plan9.
Note that some of the ideas that might sound good at first, have been tried, and basically don't work, or don't work as well as you might expect. The microkernel for instance. The Hurd is of course a microkernel based system, yet we all use Linux. Why? Because it was there, and it was pretty good. And now highly modular monolithic kernels have many of the advantages of microkernels, and microkernels have steadily increased in size as performance issues weighed in.
Ditto for a lot of other ideas that seemed good at the time, but actually perhaps weren't. AppFolders for instance (my pet one) :)
Don't you mean "Freedom", as RMS's definition of "Freedom" is different than the standard definition of "freedom" (same for "Free" v. "free"). As soon as RMS writes a license that allows for true "freedom" (ie, I can do whatever the hell I want with the licensed software, including releasing it under a non-GPL license), I will take his views on "freedom" seriously.
Why should he be?
It's a perfectly valid comparative argument. If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free", and software licensed under that non-compatible license is not "Free Software". Apache's license comes into play to show the absurdity of this. The Apache license is a perfectly valid and acceptable Open Source license, allowing you to do things like read and modify the source code, publish your changes as you see fit (or not, if you see fit not to publish), etc. The same goes for the Plan 9 license (with a few minor caveats, but little different than any other Open Source license). I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license. However, just as the Apache license is not a Free Software license, neither is the Plan 9 license. And that only really makes a difference if you're fanatical about Free Software. For 99% of the population, Open Source is good enough (you get the source code, you get the ability to change that source code, and you get the ability to redistribute your changes -- what more can you conceivably need?).
If RMS had his way, everybody would be licensing their code under the GPL. I won't bother to postulate whether that's a good or bad thing (IMHO, bad, but that's just a HO). What I will say is that it's short-sighted and naive. Software companies are not going to go away overnight (or even in the forseeable future, if you value useable software), but in a world of "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot exist.
Welcome to RMS' utopia, where software is free and no programmer has to worry about how they're going to eat, where they're going to live, how they're going to afford clothing, or anything else. Software doesn't spontaneously write itself, but if you're not getting paid to write software, you have to spend time doing something else to be able to survive. How long has it taken to get HURD to a semi-useable state again? And how much is that due to programmers only being able to work nights and weekends (assuming they have no lives) on the code, rather than having a significant core of developers who work on the project as a day job with all of the trappings -- ie, wages?