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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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
Good lord that's almost completely wrong. Wow, good job there.
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.
Little progress? If you're running linux, chances are a huge proportion of the software on your system is GNU or derived from GNU software. Torvalds wrote a kernel and surrounded it with a GNU system.
:q!
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
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?
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
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:
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)
Google to become Gnuugle?
Slashdot to become GNUSlashdot?
... 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.
The book can be found online here.
It's really worth reading. RMS's biography. Give it a try.
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.
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
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
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
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.
I think I'll send him a copy of windows for his birthday.
In Republican America phones tap you.
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
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.
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