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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!!!"
that Richard Stallmann is dead?
1) So what?
2) Yeah, whatever.
I have been pwned because my
50 years of "It's GNU/Linux, not Linux". A fate worse than death, honestly!
If the latest revalations regarding IBM's possible leakage of copyrighted Unix code into Linux have proven anything, it is that using any derivative of this outdated operating system is a legal disaster waiting to happen. Not only is Linux licensed under the anti-business GNU General Public License, but it turns out that commercial code may have been unlawfully added, making it illegal to use or distribute.
This should suprise no one familiar with the history of Unix. The earliest version was an unlicensed ripoff of the proprietary Multics operating system, and was partly responsible for destroying the market for this pioneering operating system. The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributed copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms. Microsoft Windows XP is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s. And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers. There is really no reason to use anything else, unless you need a truly high-performance computing system such as IBM's proprietary OS/390 or HP's OpenVMS.
(3, Insightful)
In the future, when people will look back on this era of computing, RMS will be a footnote and Bill Gates will be the computing hero. Not only because RMS is a complete non-entity outside of the geek world, but also because Microsoft will be writing the encyclopedia.
I have been pwned because my
That would explain the smell and the hair...
It's doubtful. Age is no replacement for wisdom.
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
Is RMS going to actually finish Hurd or is he going to cjust concentrate on stealing credit for Linux?
At least he's not a pain in the goatse guy's ass.
- Richard M. Stallman, 1996.