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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!!!"
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
Happy GNU/Birthday you smelly hippie.
:)
Is that meant to be an insult?
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.
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.
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.
While he may have done good works over the years, the guy is a nutjob! He was on Tech TV a few months back and Leo Laporte (himself an obseqious little git) looked embarassed as RMS ranted on about free software.
So happy birthday RMS. May age mellow your demeanour.
Plus I'd like to see the GNU Tools run on a kernel other than Linux (OSS not Commercial).
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD all heavily use GNU software and have gcc as the official compiler. Just remember, no compiler means no software in binary form. You will realize the importance of GNU only when you exist in a world devoid of GNU-made software and GNU-licensed (GPL) software.
And what do you use the kernel source for? I like my Linux compiled, with EMACS on top.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
... 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
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.
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
Like Ralph Nader and Jello Biafra. One need not like him to appreciate that every spectrum needs to have extreme ends.
Dunno how he calls himself an atheist on stallman.org. Clearly worships his ideas...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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 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.
You could moderate every comment of this story as redundant then (except the OffTopic posts). /. moderation at all.
You certainly haven't understand
Yet for better or worse he will always be the guy who really got the free software movement rolling. BSD continues to plod along while Linux steals the show. You can hardly attribute that to technical differences. I attribute it to Stallman's GPL - a license only a fanatic would have dreamed up.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Ralph Nader is hardly extreme. He is the best friend capitalism has. Most extremists (according to the point of view of capitalists) would like to tear capitalism down and replace it with a system that focuses on looking after humans and their environment. Now THAT is an extremist. I think, smitty one each, you should get out more. (intellectually speaking - I am sure you are hardly ever at your console *grin*)
matt