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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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Someone has to say it. Draw your own conclusions, etc. People have accused me of trolling in the past, but when I see something like this, all that FUD about Windows, all the Evil Empire snide remarks, all the lame 'M$' jokes, all the misleading and childish comments I've ever read here dissolve into a little white pixel and things are good again. The person who invented Unix is doing what the rest of the world does - use a desktop computer and desktop software that actually works - to be productive instead of to feel technically and morally "superior" (whatever that means). As Dr. Evil once said: put that in your pipe and smoke it. Yeah, I said pipe.
Because, in the real world, people use computers to get things done. They're not used to make a political statement or fight for human rights in Burma. They're tools, not toys.
Sorry again. No, really.
Mod away.
Established [in spirit] 1 Apr, 2000; modified July 2002.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Don't the majority of programers make money of writing software which solves company or organization specific problems which would be, by and large, only used inside the afore mentioned company or organization and hence under the terms of the gpl such companies or organizations would be able to use gpl'd code without distributing the source code providing that the programs they wrote were only used for internal distribution.
It seems to me that the majority of programers are paid for a service and that this service is something which would appear to be quite specific and would generally involve overcoming a specific problem that a company/organization would have as opposed to selling a product which would be a stand alone piece of software. The gpl does not threaten the incomes of people who sell a service but it has the potential to threaten those who sell a product.
The gpl is IMHO something which is very necessary to the open source movement, it insures that certain pieces of basic core software such as OS's, browsers, compilers and development environments will always remain Free (in all senses of the word) and competitive. What Gpl'd and open source software are not good at doing is producing things like modern polished computer games or highly complicated niche software and hence IMO the gpl does not pose a threat to people who produce these sort of software products. What I am trying to say is that the GPL does not threaten the majority of software developers.
I think that if the gpl and the free software foundation did not exist a lot less people would be prepared to invest their time into projects where their work could easily be stolen (fork the code into a proprietary product and sell it). I see the gpl as an insurance policy and something which is necessary for the protection of the open source ideal.