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RMS Turns 50

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-a-young-50 dept.

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!!!"

6 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. But his biography says his b-day is the 18th by abe+ferlman · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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...
    1. Re:But his biography says his b-day is the 18th by Galvatron · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, exactly. Now they only let you defer until the end of your current semester.

      --
      "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
  2. Re:not gnu by sybarite · · Score: 5, Informative

    Show the guy some respect.

    How much of your favorite distribution is from FSF/GNU? He devised the GPL without which Linux wouldn't be where it is today. He doesn't ask people to use the term GNU\Linux out of ego, but to remind them about the ideals of Free Software. Read this book and give it some thought: Free as in Freedom

  3. Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month? by ArtDent · · Score: 3, Informative

    RMS has made more contributions to the whole Open Source movement...

    Actually, I rather suspect that RMS would say his contributions were made to the Free Software movement.

    I agree with your sentiment: that we all owe RMS a great deal of respect. But part of that respect could include having a basic understanding of his movement and philosophies, even if we prefer competing, though related, ones.

  4. Free Software, not Open Source by epsalon · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  5. Re:Someone should start a BSD C/C++ compiler proje by Jimmy_B · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.
    Write a C compiler is easy. Writing a C++ compiler is hard. Writing an *optimizing* compiler is very, very hard. gcc may not produce the fastest code for any one processor, but it supports just about every processor you can name, and then some (for example, TI calculators; see my sig), and it optimizes well for all of them. And why should hackers choose to leave gcc for some upstart compiler? It would need some remarkable technical merits, and a BSD license only debatably counts as a merit at all.