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!!!"

Comments

How very like rms

[fw3]

50th birthday--not ordinarily an occasion for joy. But your support will make it a happy birthday.

To take even the occaision of his birthday as something political.

I guess it's his party and all :-)

Gosh..

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

Re:Gosh..

[SN74S181]

Sharing accounts has a long tradition among the hackers. Back in the old days of UNIX, people like Richard Stallman refused to password protect their accounts on principle.

Now, of course, people who don't password protect their accounts with totally obscure number/letter/symbol sequences are ostracized.

That's gotta bug Richard at least a little.

Re:a typo?

[stevejsmith]

"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.

Re:GNU/Linux, fah!

[Executive Override]

No... This would be like busting your ass to build a house, assemble everything from scratch, build the walls, the pumbling, everything. When it's time to build the roof, you stall a bit and then some Finish "kid" comes and builds the roof for you. Great, but all of a sudden eveyone is saying "hey man, can I go to your roof?", "At what address is your roof?", etc... "Damn it", you say, "it's a HOUSE!". And then they call you an egotist.

My first RMS memory

[dark-nl]

When I was just a little kid, my father pointed at a picture in a magazine and said, "This man says that software should be free. He wrote an editor."

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.

Re:My first RMS memory

[Virtex]

I remember the days of typing in programs from the pages of magazines like COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, RUN magazine, and Ahoy!. I tend to believe it was these types of magazines that got me into programming in the first place, and I often wonder if I would be into programming today if it were not for them. I also remember when COMPUTE! stopped publishing code because, according to them, their readers no longer wanted it. I never renewed with them after that. It's too bad kids today don't have resources like this to get them into programming like they did for me and so many others.

Re:GNU/Linux, fah!

[Caligari]

I like to refer to it as 'GNU/Linux' because this way you are acknowledging the ideals of Free Software.

People who have no awareness of 'freeness' of software or the issues involved perhaps will be curious and try to find out more about this mysterious acronym. This is precisely what happened to me after running 'Linux' before I knew anything about GNU. I have since myself spread information about Free software to many others.

I think the "Stallman wants to 0wn Linux!!!" line is childish and petty. Why not see it for what it is - an advertisement for open and enlightened attitudes. Call it GNU/Linux 'mommy's testicles' if you want, but don't hold it against the man for seeking some (deserved) recognition - not even for himself directly - but for his positive ideology.

Re:not gnu

[GrimReality]

Before saying something, I have to say that I am a Linus, RMS and Eric fan --believe it or not-- inspite of all the radically different viewpoints each of the three has. So don't think that I am supporting any one group.

Here are a few points that I would like to clarify:

1. As others would have already pointed out, the GNU people do not want credit for Linux.
2. One might also note that GNU is not a very marketing friendly name --well most FSF names aren't since they were made by, using Slashdot terms, 'nerds' for 'nerds'. So is Linus, but he happened to give a really cool name and a really cute mascot. Compare this to the gnu head of FSF.
3. In fact, it is the name 'Linux', although unintentionally, that has eclipsed GNU efforts, thanks mostly to commercial distributions.
4. In a loose sense, Linus Torvalds is also one of the 'GNU people'. Of course one can argue otherwise on technicality, especially, since Linus himself has used the term 'GNU people' in the sense that he did not belong to it.

Okey, I agree I am being a toady and humbug, but hey, I am not as smart as you guys --show some pity on your inferior.

Thank you.

Grim Reality
2003-03-17 00:09:24 UTC (2003-03-16 19:09:24 EST)

The best present you can give, to him and yoursel

[SuperKendall]

A donation to the FSF is good for everyone.

For Emacs alone, we all owe him.

So we short-shrift MIT, BSD & the rest?

[llywrch]

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