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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
Happy GNU/Birthday you smelly hippie.
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.
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
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..
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
he's going to start voting Republican?
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
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.
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
I don't know if "invention" is the right word to use; I would tend to say "Stallman's most clever hack ever was a hack on legal code, not computer code" and I'm not even sure if that's accurate. But I do agree with the spirit of your post: the GPL has done wonders for the freedom of computer users.
I just got back home after attending the FSF Associate Membership meeting at MIT yesterday. Eben Moglen mentioned in his presentation that he has never once had to go to court to defend GPL'ed software. The thing that had most of us chuckling throughout his presentation was what he attributed this success to: TACT!
RMS is certainly eccentric, but history is full of eccentric leaders and I believe that history will be kind to this one.
Happy Birthday, RMS!
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
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