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RMS Turns 50
gnuhead writes "RMS is turning 50 on the 16th, according to this post in the FSF India mailing list. Some of the members have decided to give a birthday gift to RMS by celebrating March 16th to April 15th as 'GNU/Linux' month, and having a 'It's GNU/Linux dammit!' email sig. for this month. Happy birthday RMS!!!"
GNU/Happy birthday.
(Sorry)
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
Most... trollable... story... ever.
Happy GNU/Birthday you smelly hippie.
Happy birthday Richard
To take even the occaision of his birthday as something political.
I guess it's his party and all :-)
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
RMS 5.0 released!
Sorry that's GNU/RMS 5.0 of course...
He can be a pain in the ass, but he is our pain in the ass.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
This would be like building your house out of lumber and stuff you bought from Home Depot, and having Home Depot come along after the place is built with a sign saying "Built by Home Depot, with some help by the sweaty bastard living here."
In other words, while the FSF made many valuable contributions to the Linux "movement" as it were, seeking to rename Linux is at best presumptuous.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I'm so tired of the GNU people wanting credit for Linux. They tried to develop a complete system for years, and made relatively little progress. Torvalds saved the day. And now they want naming rights? Aren't these the people who oppose intellectual property? Didn't RMS say in an interview that developers should have no control to create proprietary licenses? Then they should stop telling me to credit them for Linus's contribution.
Although in the long-term, it would be nice if we could trust companies enough to use BSD-based licenses, right now we can't trust big business farther than we can throw them.
As a result, a strong and uncompromising stance is the only thing that will protect Free software. And that is the stance you have taken.
May you see the day when business and Free software are no longer seen as mutually exclusive.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
Jeez, he's 50 already? That last pictures I saw of him made him look relatively young.
Anyways, how about for his birthday, we try to get HURD done sometime before the guy dies? Huh?
Maybe we can actually add the whole 4 extra characters and call it GNU/Linux instead of just Linux. Btw, RMS, I'm going to pronounce it G N U Linux, not Geenoo Linux, which sounds wierd. Sorry bout that one. Since GNU stands for GNU's not Linux, I prefer to speak it like I speak many other 3-letter abbreviations which don't sound good when spoken out phonetically: as letters (DOS is an exception).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
5 decades behind you, here's hoping you have 5 decades more! Thanks for all you have given to the world.
Now 64th birthday, that might be interesting. But 50 has few interesting properties besides being half of 10^2.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It seems like only yesterday when I was borrowing his account on gnu.ai.mit.edu to move some files and nearly deleted GCC 1.17 (1988).
;-)
It was late at night and I had typed 'rm gcc-1.17' instead of 'cd gcc-1.17'..
Of course nothing happened, but a friend watched me do it and we both freaked out.
Where would we be now if I had deleted RMS's gcc master!
Need I say how incredibly cool he is to have shared his account with so many needy folks back in the day..
"Dammit" is the de facto standard for running "damn" and "it" together to form an interjection. The difference lies in that "dammit" is an interjection, while "damn it" is a verb and a noun. When you say "damn it," you are damning whatever "it" may be. When you say "dammit" you're just showing a sign of anger or frusteration. Nice try...but no.
If there EVER was something deserving of a -1 redundant, this has got to be fucking it.
The news of RMS 50.0 finally being released to public eyes stokes the hearts & minds of /. readers everywhere! Get in on the cyberspace street parties to be held all month! Look for free software and copies of free linux at your favorite FTP servers while supplies last!
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
As long as there's someone who can differentiate between "then" and "than" I'll care.
There's no "n" in "dammit," dammit!
OS or kernel? I care!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You mean, RMS is a male ? *blinks, & slaps forehead* All these years .... *goes into shock*
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
I understand the whole "Linux,GNU/Linux" controversy, but the fact it is GNUed mean you can take the source, rebrand it, release it, and call it "Pile of Dog Crap" and that was perfectly okay. I think someone is having their mid-life crisis.
Happy Birthday, Big Guy!
I mean seriously. It's too bad I can't filter birthday notices out of my new articles.
:)
Someday I'm sure there will be a "Linus takes a crap" posting...
and buy him a Dell PC running Windows XP, IIS, Microsoft Office, Visual Studio.NET and Internet Explorer!
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
"I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls Stallman, whose March 18th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in 1971."
Taken from the Free as in Freedom, which you can read here.
I remembered this because I thought I shared a birthday with RMS. Perhaps I was wrong after all.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I can see everybody trolling on the GNU/Linux issue, but really seriously Stallman stands for a *lot* more than that. Without him:
- no Free Software Foundation. no GNU! at all!
- no Emacs
- no GCC
- no GDB
- no GNU/Make
Very likely there would be no Linux and no *free* BSD either. We would be using SCO and BSDI!
I don't care about the GNU/blabla name myself but his contribution, both technical and philosophical, is simply enormous. In years to come people will compare who in the early years of the personal computer made the most impact, between Bill Gates and RMS. For now the jury is still out, but I know which one I respect most and whose software I use!
Happy birthay RMS, many return! -- and thanks for not letting compromise dilute your message. May the hordes understand you some day.
are you trying to ensure that he doesn't see 51?! ;)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A bunch of people should get together and throw him a party. The problem is that too many cooks spoil the broth, er... birthday cake.
Heh.
GNU/RMS is a recursive creation of GNU/FSF, that is a recursive creation of GNU/RMS, that is a recursive creation of GNU/FSF, that is a recursive creation of [stack overflow]
Happy Birthday brave GNU/RMS!
OH SEXY MAMA!
RMS is finally legal!!!
My bad, I thought it was Richard M. Stalin.
I was trying to find the current hiding place of the cygwin utilities one day at work and I thought for a minute they had been pulled from the "market" - then I thought, "wait a minute, that software is protected by the GPL, they couldn't do that!" --- so I kept googling and found them. That realization was sort of a GNU/Zen moment for me.
Thanks to RMS for charting a solution through the horrors of software patents and such.
Even though the rest of the open source world doesn't care about GNU/Linux vs Linux anymore everytime RMS is mentioned on /. there is a dozen posts which are variations of "GNU/[story]" and "HURD is so late that xxxx will happen first".
And then, this is unbelivable, they all get moderated UP because they are "funny"!
damnit guys, move on! How many years can the exact same GNU/jokes and HURD isn't as good as Linux jokes be funny to people?
...happy birthday Root Mean Square!
Does this mean that RMS is in fact +/- 50 years old?
I think society would benefit immensely if RMS permitted the Open Source developer community to dictate his life. He would be able to leverage from their vast experience, social conscience and literary dealings. That would enhance RMS' quality of life to new levels that he could not even dream of!
Only when liberate popular masses from the steel-grip of HP can we overcome the impetus of closed-source.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Thanks for such a wonderful compiler, and all the other tools and utilities that have made the world a much better place.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Happy birthday RMS, and thanks for all the good bits!
That'd be like, Home Depot start building an entire house from the top down, but before they reach the foundations, they find another guy building a house from the ground up. If they put their house on his foundations, it's hardly "mostly his house".
But besides, the software industry is quite unlike the contruction industry (ever try to burn a house onto a CD and give it to a friend?), so the whole analogy is flawed. Put it this way: the GNU project started about 1985 (86? 84? sometime around then), while Linux originally began in 1991. It's hardly the same as your analogy, where Linus did most of the work building GNU/Linux, and the FSF just stood their handing him the occasional compiler and driver. Look at code size, look at the amount of time taken, look at the number of people involved, there's far more GNU code in GNU/Linux than there is kernel code.
he's going to start voting Republican?
will you just please shut the fuck up?
thank you.
What I think is bloody amazing, is how people think that newer IS better. UNIX has proven itself time and time again as a multi-purpose OS. You can do a lot more things in UNIX a lot easier than with Windows. It's been around for a long time and has proven itself to be a stable design. Pretty much all the implementations are true to the original design and work reliably.
Why do we have to succomb ourselves to config files that can't be edited by hand, and and OS that DOESN'T have a single user mode for recovery.
Why is UNIX outdated? Why apply a tag of 'outdated' when all the problem really is - is your lack of understanding.
I'm not one to call it Linux or GNU whatever. I run RedHat or Mandrake. A distro is collection of a kernal and lots of tools that are setup according to a set method. The way to run things like for example the location of files on RedHat != the setup used by Debian. Linux is the kernel. Many of the tools are from FSF and are GNU/n. But what I run is RH.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
GNU/Linux Distribution
Not GNU/Linux because Linux is independent of GNU.
So when saying I use Linux you're refering to the use of the Linux kernel as the base of your system.
When you say you're using Red Hat Linux you are refering to a specific Distribution that uses Linux and GNU Tools and is packaged by a third party for easy install, technical support and donation of expertise to the Linux/GNU communities.
I guess I dont see the need to append GNU because I don't frequently see people say I'm using FreeBSD-Based/Darwin/Mac OS X or I'm using SysV/Solaris (or whatever the hell it's based on).
Plus I'd like to see the GNU Tools run on a kernel other than Linux (OSS not Commercial). Hurd is POS, if a good kernel were that easy, why is Hurd so far behind?
Guess the kernel isn't that unimportant afterall.
I didn't get it at the time. From my point of view, all software was free, and its normal mode of distribution was as source listings in magazines.
It was more than a decade later when I realized he must have been talking about RMS. And now I get the point, too. It's been ages since I saw a source listing in a magazine. Without free software, the next generation of hackers would have had nothing to tinker with.
Okay Stallman... You can have this gift I bought for you, but you must allow everyone else that right as well. If anything prevents others from using it, you cannot make use of it either.
Maybe I should have gone for the LGPLed version, where you don't have to share, but you have to tell everyone everything they need to make one just like it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The GNU utilities aren't as important as you make them out to be in order to have a working Linux system. The last time the GNU/Linux people came out of the woodwork, I began a bit of a project to see how easy it is to compile the BSD toolchain to run under Linux. Guess what, it's not that hard at all. So you keep it up, I may have to finish the project, couple it with Intel's compile and start BSD/Linux, sans GNU software. I'm just that tired of the GNU zealots' bullshit
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I hate this... The GNU people are hijacking linux. Sure a lot of the Utilities are ***NOW*** from the GNU project, but not all, and certainly that was not the situation from the start.
Since originally LINUX was semi-compatible with minix... And all the utilities were MINIX ones... So I suppose you could call it minix/LINIX
Darryl
If he's like the GNU fileutils, the 50 is octal. Which makes him only 40 decimal years old.
It could be worse. If he used hex, he'd be 80 decimal.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
... give your age in hexadecimal. Happy 0x32's b-day!
14
as much I as really hate the nitpicking mess surrounding this issue, your analogy is the most relavent I've seen....
The following is a joke. Please don't take it seriously. Since he made such a big argument I suppose it is okey to make some jokes using some words from his post.
Here are a few variants of a clich by different people.
Thank you for reading this nonsense.
Grim Reality
2003-03-17 00:19:13 UTC (2003-03-16 19:19:13 EST)
P.S.:
...somebody hire the man a hooker! 50 years is long enough!
Just kiddin', happy birthday RMS !
Octal is king! Just 16 more years before RMS turns 100.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
How about, for the entire GNU/Month charge outlandish subscription-based prices for all GNU/software retroactive for the last 20 years!!!
...is this thing on?
Hello?
What is music when you despise all sound?
I would like to know if there exists a compiler (other than gcc/egcs) that compiles the Linux kernel reliably and has these features:
1. freely available
2. open source
3. source freely modifiable and distributable
...I thought the root-mean-square technique dated back to the 19th century, at least.
Wow, with an analogy that logical, you should be a scientific creationist! Anyway, here's what a respected source of opinion says about GNU/Linux, the venerable jargon file:
(Some people object that the name `Linux' should be used to refer only to the kernel, not the entire operating system. This claim is a proxy for an underlying territorial dispute; people who insist on the term `GNU/Linux' want the the FSF to get most of the credit for Linux because RMS and friends wrote many of its user-level tools. Neither this theory nor the term `GNU/Linux' has gained more than minority acceptance).
By the same argument, you should call it GNU/BSD, GNU/Solaris, etc etc etc.
All the *nixes rely on gnu tools (gcc, tcsh, emacs, etc) for a great degree of their operation. So why does RMS obsess over linux and not everything else?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Every free flavor of BSD uses the GNU Compiler Collection to compile nearly all of their apps, and ships it as the standard system compiler.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As a professional developer I think RMS's contributions to the entire software world are probably bigger than any other single individual's.
/. yet.
:(
Maybe Bill Gates controls more software. But thanks to RMS and the GPL and LPGL I do have a much easier time developing software.
People really don't understand the impact of those licenses. What allowed Linux to come from behind and eventually surpass BSD? Hard to say for sure, but I have a feeling the fact that it is Free had something to do with it.
Hell, what has Microsoft scared? BSD? Nope. Linux? Yep. Well, sort of. Not because it is "Linux"-a great kernel gaining popularity because it is put inside a great OS (Redhat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, etc). It is because it is "GNU/Linux", a good enough kernel with a bunch of software licensed under the GPL. This is what has Microsoft scared.
Also, to be perfectly honest, I don't think this "RMS sucks because he wants the GNU contribution to be reconized in Linux" bashing is done by developers. People who knew him or know what he did seem to respect him/his work, even if they disagree with his hard stance on Free software. I really get the impression 90% of the disrespectful posts come from kids who spend their lunch hours the computer labs at school and really don't know much outside of
The more I think about it the more I appreciate all this guy did. He is an extreme geek who has dedicated his life (no wife to ask him to come to bed instead of coding long hours) to making Free software and in return for all his hard work he takes more than his fair share of verbal abuse on forums.
Happy Birthday RMS and thank you for everything.
If you want to read the sourcecode they're GPL free. If you want to compile them to binary format, you have to either get a proprietary compiler or a GPL compiler, since there are no good BSD ones.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Happy Birthday to GNU,
Happy Birthday, Dear Richard. . . "
Oh, sorry. Just one of the many variants *somebody* is obligated to post sooner or later.
I'll GNU/Shutup now.
KFG
I may have to finish the project, couple it with Intel's compile and start BSD/Linux, sans GNU software.
Don't you mean INTEL/Linux?
Google to become Gnuugle?
Slashdot to become GNUSlashdot?
Astroturfing is too hit-or-miss for pragmatists like Microsoft, and why bother? A couple hundred grand a year through various cut-outs to the FSF... keep Stallman circulating, keep his "keynote speaker" status going... Four or five times a year, hire a stringer to push one of his anti-capitalist buttons in front of a room full of journalists and industry people.
(Like dirty trickster Lyndon B. Johnson said, the trick is to make the sumbitch DENY it.)
Boom, the "Linux = illegal to charge money" meme surfaces on Slashdot and there's 500 comments worth of sumbitches denying it. And anyone who disagrees is called an astroturfer!
You are cool.
Hey, let's be nice to the guy for a change and celebrate by telling everyone "It's Apple/Windows dammit!" But next up is "Xerox/Mac OS", of course.
... as in "Redhat Linux", "SuSE Linux", "Mandrake Linux", and so forth. It's the distributors, certainly not the FSF, who ought to be credited by name for this operating system we have running in front of us. They are the ones who put together the CDs, developed the installers, wrote additional software, and collected all the software packages that we can use. They have developed the support and sales organizations, and the distribution channels that have brought this OS out to the general public.
/etc, the SDB help system, and many other useful details. Maybe you need to know these things in order to help me solve a problem. But if somebody says they have "GNU/Linux", they're just making a political statement. If you want to know something useful about their system, your next question will have to be, "Yeah, but what distro do you have?"
An important part of the software in a typical distro comes from the FSF, for which the FSF deserves considerable credit. But any distro has software from very many other sources; enough so that the FSF does not deserve so much credit as to get to choose the name.
Note that expressions like "Redhat Linux" or "SuSE Linux" really are common parlance, and these names communicate useful information. If I tell you I have SuSE Linux, then you can surmise that I have the YaST installer, a certain kind of layout under
Really now, did the folks at FSF India really mean to do RMS a favor? There are certainly many things for which RMS could be honored, and deservedly so. Why did they have to pick out the most controversial, tendentious and dubious of all of his pursuits? Frankly, I can imagine anything worse they could have done for him.
There is no "GNU/Linux", nor is there a "GNU/Hurd" or a GNU/anything else, because the FSF has failed to produce anything that might be called the GNU operating system. The FSF has produced a lot of outstanding software, but a GNU OS does not exist. Maybe someday, but not now. They have nothing comparable to the distro CDs from which an OS named "GNU" can be installed, in fact no installer that I know of, no support organization, nor anything else comparable to the value that organizations like Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake and the rest provide. And of course, there is no Hurd kernel. The FSF has been remarkably successful at many, many things, and I admire them greatly for it. But the effort to create an operating system called "GNU" has been a failure.
Thus to insist on calling something "GNU/Linux" is a kind of intellectual dishonesty that, to my mind, comes uncomfortably close to plagiarism. It is an attempt to get credit for other people's work.
Happy birthday to RMS, and congratulations for the many fine things he has accomplished in 50 years.
But an OS called GNU is not among those accomplishments, and the obsession with the name "GNU/Linux" is something for which no one deserves any praise.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
It is a shame that most of the responses to this story are lame and GNU/Linux remarks. RMS started the whole Open Source movement almost single handedly, and has contributed a lot more to it than any single person has.
Happy Birthday Mr Stallman! I owe a lot of my CS education to you and the excellant GNU programming tools.
This Stallman fellow represents nothing more than communism, plain and simple. He advocates the sharing of "open source" source software at little or, most often, no charge. I exposed communists in Hollywood in the '50s, and I'll be damned if I'll let it creep its way back into our capitalist paradise.
Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.
--Ronald Reagan
When I saw this story I thought the same that many of you did: "Oh shit, this is going to be the biggest flame war ever." But so far it looks like I'm wrong. Browsing from my ivory tower of +4 most comments about RMS are respectful and informative. Slashdot has a (partially deserved) reputation as the epicenter of uninformed knee-jerk reactions, but it's good to see that when it matters there's a deep current of respect for the man.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Happy Birthday!!! I've been a fan of his for a long time. So hope he enjoys his birthday.
If you have food, water, shelter and warmth like that, please give me some so that I might share it. In the mean time, you can use all the RMS code you like and so can I despite your best wishes. You have your wishes and I have mine.
I hope someone nice is around when you turn all that hate inward towards it's source.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
There really is a SFU; it is a subsystem, and these people are using it. But you can't use a subsystem by itself; a subsystem is useful only as part of a whole operating system. SFU now inludes Interix which is normally used in a combination with the GNU development toolchain and libraries : the system is basically GNU, with SFU functioning as the compatibility DDL Library layer.
Many users are not fully aware of the distinction between the compiler toolset, which is SFU, and the whole system, which they also call `SFU''. The ambiguous use of the name doesn't promote understanding.
Programmers generally know that is a Subsystem. But since they have generally heard the whole system called `Interix' as well, they often envisage a history which fits that name. For example, many believe that once Softway Systems finished writing the posix compatibility DDL Libraries, they looked around for other free software, and for no particular reason most everything necessary to port a Unix-like system was already available.
What they found was no accident--it was the GNU system. The available free software added up to a complete system because the GNU Project had been working since 1984 to make one. The GNU Manifesto had set forth the goal of developing a free Unix-like system, called GNU. The Initial Announcement of the GNU Project also outlines some of the original plans for the GNU system. By the time Interix was written, the system was almost finished.
Most software projects have the goal of developing a particular program for a particular job. For example, Softway Systems set out to build an environment to allow UNIX apps to be ported directly to NT. Donald Knuth set out to write a text formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window system (X Windows). It's natural to measure the contribution of this kind of project by specific programs that came from the project.
If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way, what would we conclude? If you had access to the full source code of SFU with Interix, you might find found that, GNU software was the largest single contingent, around 60% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no compatable subsystem. SFU by without Interix itself could be about 20%. So if you were going to pick a name for the system based on who wrote the programs in the system, the most appropriate single choice would be `GNU''.
But we don't think that is the right way to consider the question. The GNU Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we developed one. The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system: GNU.
Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the system, and they all deserve credit. But the reason it is a system--and not just a collection of useful programs--is because the GNU Project set out to make it one. We made a list of the programs needed to make a complete free system, and we systematically found, wrote, or found people to write everything on the list. We wrote essential but unexciting major components, such as the assembler and linker, because you can't have a system without them. A complete system needs more than
he uses the power of the most powerful lobby in the country, composed of people of similarly advanced, uh, stature, and gets them to push for free software.
Come on. Picture it. GNU/Raging Grannies. You know you want to.
The guy writes some good software (I for one was PISSED his autoconfiguring tool for the Linux Kernel wasn't adopted) but how exactly is his birthday news?
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
I'm going to change my sign to "I don't care what that asshole RMS says, it is not GNU/Linux!"
Hey, let's call it LinGNUx...that really rolls off the tongue. Happy Birthday Richard! You're whacky , but we love you! Your compiler liberated software for everyone! Much thanks for that & all the utilities! Ralph -- Let's call it LinGNUx
Do we have to say "GNU/Redhat Linux" or "Redhat GNU/Linux"?
God dammit, someone please mod parent as off-topic!
Where the hell did you pull that from?
Sure, there is the sense of "damn it" where you are damning some "it", and the sense of voicing anger and frustration where "it" is not some specific thing, but this spelling stuff has nothing to do with it.
You absolutely can write "damn it!" and mean it as an interjection. Haven't you ever annunciated "DAMN it!" where the two words are distinct but without referring to some "it"? In writing you might see it either way. "Dammit" is very acceptable because it is commonly used, but I don't know why you are acting like your own opinion on when to use these two spellings is in some way the actual logic behind it.
My background is math, not CS, but I'm led to believe that writing a compiler (or at least the core of one) is a standard thing to do for undergrad CS students... some enterprising hacker should write a bare-bones C compiler and release it under the BSD license. It seems to me that if it were well-designed, plenty of hackers would be glad to help out with the optimizer, writing backends for other CPUs, etc... and perhaps after a few years, the compiler would be solid enough for the *BSDs to switch to as their default compiler.
Today would make a great day to join the "GNU Full-Name Project". Following in the footsteps of distributed computing projects like "seti@home", the goal of the GNUFNP is to calculate the full recursive name of the GNU project.
Right now we're at:
((((((((((((((((((((GNU's Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux) Not Linux)
Okay, so we're not very far... it's our first day!
Writing an interpreter for a simple (usually functional) language is a fairly common part of many undergraduate programming languages classes. Writing an actual compiler is more rarely done (unless your school offers an upper-division elective in compilers), and writing a compiler for a language as complex and nasty as C or C++ is pretty much never done at the undergraduate level. It's not particularly easy to do; even gcc is still quite a bit behind commercial compilers in many areas, and it's been worked on for nearly two decades now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
LOL! The first thing coming to my mind when reading the news was:
"Oh my god! I'm gonna be in a RMS Free World one day!"
A donation to the FSF is good for everyone.
For Emacs alone, we all owe him.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We started coding like madmen. Code flowed from me as I knelt on the ground in front of my P90 laptop. I soon noticed a rythmic motion to myself. It was to the beat of 'The Bad Touch'. This was being played on our OGG streamer. But, I wasn't keeping beat. I took a long pull on the glass pipe and turned around to see Patrick 'Doctor Gateskiller' Czrapadunski fucking me in the ass. He was wearing a code poet shirt and looked blissful. He gave me a hit off of his glass pipe. Then I remember seizing up, a scream, and blacking out.
Now, I have a bloody dick stuck in my ass. I tried to get it out with a pair of salad tongs, but that just lodged it in deeper. I REALLY don't want to go to hospital, but what else can I do? Anyone out there have any previous experience? Thanks.
Tubgirl needs a large meat stick to plug that geyser.
Debian Gnu/Linux
Which Royal Mail Ship are you talking about?
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Behind what? hurd is a micro-kernel and is far better than Linux for some applications.
You saying if Japan can build the earth simulator why is transmetta so far behind. Well I wouldn't want the earth simulator in my laptop.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
If there were a more formal procedure then he wouldn't be getting the personal emails. I think most kernel hackers would love an explicit set of policies on how to get patches considered. Right now its very hit or miss and no one is really sure where they stand.
Why don't we call it
H P
(drumroll please)
GNU/Linux/X11/Gnome/KDE/Apache/Sendmail/MySql/P
to recognise only a few of the other open source projects that helped the Linux kernel get to where it is today (and only a few)
Arguably the GNU tools weere one of the first big steps for Linux...but LAMP and KDE have certainly had just as much to do with it's long-term viability...
Brian
I think the context of the whole Linux vs. GNU/Linux debate is entirely lost on people having read the thread below. The suggestion came out of a time where the Linux kernel group had forked the C library because they were unhappy with the FSF's management. That wasn't bad what was bad was their very casual attitude towards the fork "we aren't GNU users wer are Linux users". An attitude which Linus didn't share (he essentially the kernel as a short term kernel until Hurd was finished).
:-)
Contrast this with the attitude of the Lucent towards their fork of emacs. They had tried very hard to work out compromises. While they were unable to reunite enough so that package managers could write for one platform the XEmacs team never failed to recognize XEmacs as a product born of Emacs.
RMS felt that the primary problem was the distinctive name. XEmacs users couldn't help but see their work as derived from Emacs because of the name while it was very easy for Linux users to fail to understand the dependencies on GNU products. How things like Binutils were vital to creating a GPL kernel, and at the same time had been boring tedious unfun work for the FSF. Just ask yourself the simple question if XEmacs had been called Xlispedit might Xlispedit users have neccesarily seen the connection between their editor and the FSF's?
RMS got a little heavy handed with Debian over the Linux GNU/Linux issue and this among other issues resulted in Debian becoming independent of the FSF. Now consider that RMS followed this up with two more battles:
a) The battle against KDE
b) The battle against the term "open source"
and you can see how he's made enemies.
The fact is that:
a) Linux is part of the GNU project
b) A large number of Linux users do not know this
b2) A time when a lot of Linux users learn about this is during discussion of Linux vs. GNU/Linux
c) An even larger number of Linux users do not understand the philosophy and motivation of the GNU project (though a pretty high percentage think they do)
d) RMS's battle against QT resulted in huge improvements to QT/C++. Today QT could play the same role for C++ that the C-standard library does for C. That can't help but benefit KDE over the long haul. The treatment was very painful and the results are highly positive.
e) Everything RMS said would happen regarding the term "open source" has happened.
Anyway happy birthday RMS. I hope the next 10 years are as succesful as these 10. Winning battles can take a great out of you.
But the GUI is based on MIT's development, so shouldn't we call it GNU/MIT/Linux? And Perl & Python follow other licenses. And BTW, a number of important packages included in Linux distributions are available under the BSD license.
Why *don't* we call it ``GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Perl/Python/Linux"?
Or what about the fact most computers with Solaris also have various GNU utilities installed. Most of the time, the same ones that come with a Linux distribution? Why don't we call it ``GNU/Solaris". heck, it would make troubleshooting problems with a Solaris box far easier.
RMS was presented with these very same questions a few months ago on LWN, & like a broken computer program, all he could say was ``It's not the same thing" & talk around the question. He wants to talk about ``GNU/Linux". Anything else involving a program where the code was freely available matters doesn't matter to him.
As I see it, someone took RMS's idea of free software & extended it. Made the software even more free. And RMS is having problems getting his head around that fact. Too bad for him; I'm still going to call it Linux.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
But if somebody says they have "GNU/Linux", they're just making a political statement.
I don't think even RMS would disagree with this.
The FSF is very political, because they're fighting a idealogical war.
On the one hand we have dictators like Microsoft that put a tax on any computer Joe Average buys and strips their natural rights away through EULA's. On the other hand we have the FSF beating the drum for the GPL and software that guarantees the user's rights.
I personally don't go around saying GNU/Linux, mainly because it's a mouthful, but I do understand why the GNU/Linux people preach it: they're trying to increase mindshare about free software.
And Linux wouldn't exist without free software.
The original dream of RMS was to make a complete free (as in speech) system, which he called GNU. He started by writing an editor. Then a compiler, a C library and various other tools were created. The GNU system was complete, except for one key piece: The kernel. This is where Linux comes into the picture. Linus Trovalds wrote one piece of the GNU system, thus making it a complete system - GNU/Linux.
People insisting not to call the system GNU do not realize that without RMS and the GNU project, there would not be any "Linux", not to mention distributions such as Mandrake and RedHat. Without RMS's inisiting on making a free OS, we would not have one today. It's not about how substantial are FSF-owned parts of the software, but it's about how credit is due for starting the project.
Oh, and as a side note - there is an OS that's called "GNU/Linux". Its full name is Debian GNU/Linux. You can buy or download CDs of this version of the GNU system which includes the Linux kernel and install it on your machine.
Please, use GNU/Linux to remember how it all began, and to acknowledge your right to freedom.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
I think I'll send him a copy of windows for his birthday.
In Republican America phones tap you.
I just turned 20 today... What, I don't get a slashdot story about it?
-Joe
RMS has nothing to do with the "Open Source" movement. RMS's movement is called "Free Software", or GNU. More information is available on the GNU site.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Happy Birthday St. Ignucius of the Church of Emacs!
;)
And special thanks to proprietary printer software
I don't care what anybody else thinks, RMS is one bad mother fucker.
Keep fighting the good fight, you stalwart fuck! I got your back!
You could moderate every comment of this story as redundant then (except the OffTopic posts). /. moderation at all.
You certainly haven't understand
I wrote an article about free books that used Stallman as the personification of a certain approach to free information, based mainly on the portrayal of him in the biography Free As In Freedom. Well, the article never even referred to the biography directly, but after it appeared on Slashdot, I got an e-mail from Stallman saying that my article showed some misconceptions about him, his work, and his ideas. He said it sounded like I might have gotten some of those mistaken impressions from Free As In Freedom. We exchanged one or two more messages, but I never did really find out from him exactly what he thought was so inaccurate in Free As In Freedom. I think part of it was that he didn't like having himself characterized, both in the biography and in my article, as Mr. Cathedral, versus Eric Raymond as Mr. Bazaar. But I think there must have been more to it than that.
Find free books.
The GNU system was complete, except for one key piece: The kernel.
Paraphrase: The GNU Operating System was complete, except for one key piece: The Operating System.
Lets be honest now. Linux doesn't NEED GNU/FSF to be an operating system. It can have non-GNU editors; the kernel can be compiled by a compiler that is NOT gcc. The C libraries could come from another source altogether. Linux could exist without one speck of RMS code/FSF code in it.
Just because it currently does, it doesn't give RMS and the FSF de facto "ownership" of it. A dictated name sounds like exactly that. "It couldn't exist without us, therefore its ours! and its GNU/Linux because WE say it is!"
Yes, RMS did a lot for the community. That doesn't give him the right to dictate to us what we should call the fruits of our COLLECTED efforts. That's not what freedom is, Richie.
The
Kirby
Mr. Gates, is that you?!
GNU/Linux' month ????
No way !!! This is the GNU's month!!!
Thanks for all your help, Richard.
As much as I admire his courage and conviction to stand by his ideals, can somebody point me to some places where his techincal skills are talked about?.
Any place where there is a decent write up about his hacking skills?.
And yeah, Happy Birthday Richard!
...and Happy Birthday RMS!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This really is going to bring them all out of the woodwork :)
GNU/Linux sig oh my got.
Thing is, people are calling this OS after the kernel, they can. Windows is named after it's windows manager. Many people call the OS they are using, "RedHat".
FSF could come out with a distro and call it GNU.
Further, the idea that GNU doesn't get credit is'nt really fair, how long can you use Linux without reading GNU this and GNU that?
It's a test of freedom, and the software is winning.
-pyrrho
Linux doesn't NEED GNU/FSF to be an operating system. It can have non-GNU editors; the kernel can be compiled by a compiler that is NOT gcc. The C libraries could come from another source altogether. Linux could exist without one speck of RMS code/FSF code in it.
True, however GNU/Linux needs the GNU part in order to be a free operating system. Windows is an OS without (almost) any GNU code, but it's not free.
Just because it currently does, it doesn't give RMS and the FSF de facto "ownership" of it. A dictated name sounds like exactly that. "It couldn't exist without us, therefore its ours! and its GNU/Linux because WE say it is!"
GNU do not claim "ownership" over Linux (the kernel). They rightfully claim authorship of the all parts of the GNU system except the kernel. All these parts in are a GNU/Linux distribution are GNU.
The GNU Operating System was complete, except for one key piece: The Operating System.
Wrong. A kernel is not an operating system. An operating system is the overall environment required for operating a computer and running applications. This includes standard libraries, a shell, system utilities (including an editor), and even a calculator and games. All these are parts of the GNU system that are already written and used in GNU/Linux distributions.
If some company replaces all (or most) elements of the GNU system with proprietary software and packages that with the Linux kernel, it will not be a GNU/Linux system.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
The skills needed for compiler-writing are pretty specialized; mostly low-level hardware-specific stuff (the high-level language-design stuff can be taught by implementing an interpreter -- that I certainly see as a valuable portion of any undergrad CS degree). Unless you plan to do something which would use those skills, it doesn't seem very useful to require them, any more than it would be to require an upper-division course in computability theory for someone who wasn't planning to do graduate study in theoretical CS.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
RMS is 50! Hopefully he's got another 50 years left so that he can write more great software and further the concept that it is our RIGHT to have free software! May life be good to RMS and bad to all his foes.
We are indebted to Richard for GNU/FSF. Thanks dude! Keep on fighting!
;-)
However, a world without EMACS would be a happier place.
Just had to crack that one in there.
Watch out, Hitler. Dick Stalin is in town. More fearsome than a dozen angry Tatars, he's...Dick Stalin.
Born Iosef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, he's collected power for fifteen years and now he's back, and he's...Dick Stalin.
So if you're a Capitalist, or a Leftist, or a Dick Trotskyite, or just about anyone else, watch out: he's...Dick Stalin.
If he keeps eating fucking junkfood he just might be, very soon.
Well done! Join the crusade to stamp this idiocy out.
But it sucks that you'd be paying the M$ Tax, so just make a contribution.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
I call it GNU/Linux because Debian likes the GNU/Linux name... I would not say that I call it GNU/Linux to recognize RMS rather I call it GNU/Linux in appreciation to the FSF philosophy...
:)
Also I think that the development of GNU/Hurd is a kind of surrender from the FSF people... Saying ok you can call it Linux but hey here we go this knew kernel which is a part of the GNU system and we call it GNU/Hurd but not GNU/Herd
I turned 38 on the 16th, but unlike RMS I am neither a hippy or particularly principled.
A very happy birthday to you Mr. Stallman!
Hope to see you at OSCON this year. I enjoyed your "Straight Talk" session last year.
Girls are strange. They don't come with a man page.
-- Michael Mattsson
RMS should be the man of the year on Time Magazine. He is already a living legend!
Happy birthday and i'll say GNU/Linux!!!
I am ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas. I sure didn't elect this cowboy!
... Ron Mitchel Sanders!!!
Hahahah. Just kidding.
Happy Birthday Richard M. Stallman!!!!!!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Easy to pronounce or sound like a twat? I care!
GNU did not realise that there was desperate need for a unix-like kernel on x86. They then made another mistake by not supplying a ready-to-go distribution when one called linux appeared.
From my point of view, GNU supply me with a (very good) set of bin utils that I rarely use. The KDE project supplies me with a lot more stuff I do use. But most importantly; RedHat supplied me with the means to get the whole thing up and running when I was a noob.
Happy Birthday RMS! For at least another 50 years of you! I'll support you forever!!
No, for the creation of Emacs he should pay his users for all the RAM they have had to buy over the years.
Think also of the GCC for DOS that was knocking around. There were also ports to a number of different target systems. If you wanted a native or cross-compiler that could be relatively easily implemented, you went to GCC.
Even if you managed to avoid GCC, there was always "the other Unix editor", emacs which was definitely well known in the Unix world. Maybe the man in the street hadn't heard about this, but GNU and the FSF was well known by people in the computer industry for over ten years. probably the critical point was changing the GPL licence on the C library to LGPL. This made it easy to use GCC in a commercial environment.
GNU/Happy GNU/B-day, GNU/Richard! GNU/Keep GNU/working GNU/on GNU/emacs GNU/and GNU/I'll GNU/be GNU/happy GNU/too!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
I'm off to read the Underwood/Children of Dune
Who really gives a flying GNU/fuck?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
unfortunately, my school didn't have us writing compilers, just business applications. but from what i hear, the compilers written by undergraduates are "basic" compilers, often for a custom language that accepts a few keywords and can do a few basic tasks. i would feel fairly confident to say that developing a c compiler is not a trivial task.
[AC wrote "I had typed 'rm gcc-1.17' instead of 'cd gcc-1.17'" to which tuxedo-steve replied "Thank god that cd doesn't have a recursive switch."]
And this does matter because .....? Notice that there's a huge difference between cd and cp. Do you really think that cd -R foobar should do something special?
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
If you believe that which you say, you've never read or heard his words.
Go read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-fr eedom.html to understand the difference between Free Software and the superfluous spin-off "Open Source".
Then read everything else in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
To finish off, go to http://audio-video.gnu.org/ to get some live action!
Don't take this as an insult, but please know the Word before you speak it (yes, that was a biblical allusion).
That stuff always cleans me out fast. Don't know what it is... probably the oats.
Nice story, BTW.
plz provide an abstract next time k tks.
To celebrate RMS birthday I set up a GNU/Hurd machine. Check out http://absturz.htu.tuwien.ac.at.
And don't let netcraft fool you. They don't have their OS-detection-logic up to date. Neighter has nmap.
And if you can't reach it, that's a feature (TM) since it's stability is worse than Win 3.0 with DR-Dos 7 underneath it.
EdgarI'd sing to you, but "Happy Birthday" isn't free. Is there's a GPL licensed GNU/Happy Birthday?
GNHP = GNHP is Not Happy Birthday...
>the post... is wrong
The post referred to claims that the GPL is largely responsible for the success of linux. You're asserting that the reason linux has more momentum than bsd has little to do with the GPL and more to do with legal red tape that bsd got temporarily snared in.
Regardless of bsd's legal woes, the GPL has a starring role in the success of linux. The GPL guarantees that every corporation that releases versions of linux will contribute to the code available for everyone to use. This is not the case with bsd; look at Apple's wholesale adoption of bsd, yet the bsd development effort will not substantially benefit from the hundreds of thousands of engineering hours that Apple puts into OSX code. This is a slam-dunk advantage for linux, directly attributable to the GPL. Despite bsd's legal woes having been over for a decade, they will not overtake linux's momentum for this reason. And competing GPL OSes like hurd will only gain mindshare to the extent that they confer some overall advantage over linux.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Even with my trolling account I wouldn't be that bad! :)
RMS famously spewed out a huge flame when someone posted a birth announcement to a mailing list he read. To quote the madman himself: "Could people please not use this list to announce information of no particular interest to the people on the list? Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy. Nor is it a difficult achievement--even some fish can do it."
Could people please not use Slashdot to anounce information of no particular interest to anybody? Hundreds of thousands of people turn 50 every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy.
For more information, click here.
I have patented the following: "50th birthday" "half-century" "old fart" I turned 50 on March 7th, 9 days before RMS, thus he cannot claim prior art. I insist he cease and desist from being 50 or pay me royalties. I also forsee problems with "51st birthday" etc which have patents pending. No seriously, I wish RMS many more. Great world-changing achievements.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
and I'll politic if I want to
politic if I want to...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Interestingly, Debian has taken you up on this. From www.debian.org:
> Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with more than 8710 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
Quote-unquote.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Root-Mean-Squared didn't make a lot of sense.
:)
Now I get it
Better check that code. It's "GNU's not Unix".
about as important as the fictious:
Linus is resting safe at home after his
non-life threatning infected hangnail was
removed...
BY the way, why aren't you saying 40h birthday?
I think what you just stated is THE reason why RMS wants you to call it that. Of course, in the spirit of Freedom, anyone is allowed to disagree and call it whatever they want.
Due to the efforts of the Free Software Foundation, I can say I now know more about computer science as a whole. Enjoy your birthday!
"They say travel broadens the mind, so I went over the falls in a barrel." -Thomas Dolby
... that he celebrates the occasion by taking a bath.
Oops! :(
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
I thought it was called RedHat
Math is hard! Let's go Shopping! Barbie
If RMS is 50, then Richard Stallman must be 70.72 (this being the peak value calculated by dividing 50 by 0.707).
come on fhqwhgads
I hope you get laid today! ;-)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
That's the general consensus. And as you said, "dammit" is not wrong (in fact, it's probably more correct than "damn it"). That's the point I was trying to make, because the grandparent poster was saying that it was blatently wrong. Thank you for your time...that is all.
There will be huge rush of "fans" letting RMS know that he is now eligible to join the American Associate of Retired Persons and that "retirement" is a Good Thing, Your Work Here is Done Now, etc.:)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
True, however GNU/Linux needs the GNU part in order to be a free operating system.
Really? I didn't realize that in order to be free, it had to be GNU. I'm sure a LOT of people would be VERY suprised to hear that.
If some company replaces all (or most) elements of the GNU system with proprietary software and packages that with the Linux kernel, it will not be a GNU/Linux system.
Who said anything about proprietary? I just said from another source. Those sources COULD be non-FSF, non-GNU free.
There is more to free software than GNU.
The
I don't know any non-GNU free implementation of a C compiler, C standard library, filetools, bintools, etc., etc. No, it doesn't have to be GNU, but it is, and there are yet no free replacements for the GNU parts of the GNU/Linux OS.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Happy Birthday, Richard!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.