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Stallman Meets KDE Team for Tea
fishermonger writes "Trying to imoprove relations, the french KDE team invited RMS to tea at Linux Solutions 2003. From the piece: 'He asked whether KDE people were saying "Gnu/Linux" or just "Linux", and Open Source or Free Software. I told him some of us are using KDE/Gnu/Linux which pleased him as an answer.' Many pearls in the article."
Here ya'll go.
h tml
http://people.ucsc.edu/~twilly/tea-with-stallman.
The kernel is of course called Linux.
The operating system on the other hand is GNU/Linux.
However his die hard views seem strange. If Linus calls his kernel Linux and not gnuLinux then its called Linux. A name is a name. Who cares? I could call it Katzware! But its still Linux.
RMS has no issue with the kernel's name. He doesn't think that Linus' kernel, the Linux kernel itself should be called GNU/Linux. His problem is that people called entire distros which use the Linux kernel simply "Linux." He has a problem with this because a big part of any Linux distro is a bunch of GNU software. He evidentally things that any user of Linux should be forced to pay him in respect and homage by calling it GNU/Linux instead of simply Linux. Afterall, the kernel is a very small part of it. But if we're talking about how much of what makes up a distro, Linux should be probably be called XFree/Linux86 before GNU/Linux, at least in terms of total KLOC in a distro.
Are you sure he uses XFree86 on his desktop? I imagine that RMS gets by perfectly fine without using any non-GPL software... I wouldn't be surprised if he did use non-GPL stuff, but he's not your average 16 year old Windows convert- he doesn't need XFree or KDE or GNOME or even WindowMaker.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I'm pretty sure emacs has paid attention to SIGWINCH for many years now... Not being a KDE user, I don't have konsole, but I just ran emacs 21.3 in an xterm (emacs -nw), and emacs resized properly when I resized the xterm window. Also works in a PuTTY ssh session.
Translation (the Italian -> French -> English might be a bit dodgy in places).
In 1952 for the first time the signature of the composer Nino Rota appeared in a film of Frederico Fellini. The film was "The White Sheik", which is also the first film Fellini made solo. The artistic friendship continued without interruption until "The orchestra's rehearsal" in 1979, the year Rota died.
The collaboration between Fellini and Rota was that of two authors who, in a different way, both managed to express emotions and states of mind, realities and fantasies. Both did independently using no common cultural root or education.
The origin of this collaboration was an offer that Rota only accepted half-heartedly, but this first meeting was very successful. "We understood we would work well together -- this was not by choice however", recalled Fellini. "This was really a convergence of two temperaments, two beings who would, within the limit of their output, live together with the expression of a film, made more vital, more
evocative through music".
Contrary to what you may think, X GUI is _not_ everything. I cannot think of any alternative scheme (except maybe VNC, which is rather slow) to screen + Emacs. I start a screen session on my terminal at home, then go to school, ssh into my box, reconnect to my screen, and copy class notes from there. It's really fast, and I can get anything I need (on my box, that is) from anywhere in the world (with net access).
Also, for my purposes), Emacs is practically everything. IDE, IRC client, mail client, browser, shell... etc. Heck, you can even run vim on it. It's meant to be run once and kept up. Extremely put, Emacs is an almighty OS running on top of GNU/Linux. +)
Oh yeah, and Emacs on X is a nice bonus, of course.
Kudos to RMS.
--- Live and Learn Crash and Burn
The GNU implementation of the ISO/C++ language has only recently (since gcc-3.0) been close enough to the standard to be really useful.
Before then C++ was difficult to work with. See the Mozilla recommended style guide that lists the features not to use to be portable. It starts with "do not use templates".
Working standard templates is the number one reason to use C++ these days, if you ask me. They are even more useful than all that OO stuff, and fantastic in combination with OO.
Combined with all that is the notion that C++ is a hard language to learn and that people (amateurs) will be productive much faster with C, although this point really is debatable. Learning C++ through the standard library (containers, algorithms, etc) is now the recommended way, and using this part of the language is relatively simple and safe.
Hopefully this GNU recommendation will be dropped one day.
Problem is the g++ gnu compiler sucked ass until recently. Even today it compiles code slow. Many people saw how bloated and slow the badly compiled programs were and assumed C++ sucked. Alot of this was in the late 80's and early 90's when computers were alot slower and a new wave of thinking from recent CS grads who never had to write programs in kb's rather then megs. Old Unix hackers had to use assembly to cut down on cpu and memory. Code wasting cpu cycles and memory for gui's and object oriented programming, and solving relationships was blaspemy. The mac was hated for years because of this. Even though it had a workstation class processor that could cream an 8086 pc. It was assumed no cpu cycles were left to do anything usefull. That was a lie. Infact during this time sed was written just because ED and VI were viewed as too bloated. Also sed was usefull in scripting which is why it lasted but I remember the author complaining about huge memory and sed was the answer. Today this is silly but some still are biased who are from this era. RMS definetly was from this that time.
They also only do functional and not object oriented programming most of the time. It is true that over doing it and calling everything as an object is bad. Both Linux and FreeBSD use objects even though they are mostly functional programs. It really is appropriate in alot of situations.
Objects have their uses and desktop gui's is certainly one of them. Object oriented programming is great for simulations which a desktop is. Its really a virtual 2d desk with a word processor as a paper pad, a spreadsheet as a balance book, and a web browser as large book with links as a toc.
Similiating a desk and writing event driven programs certainly needs to be done in a object oriented manner. It can be done without objects but it would be difficult and could easily produce buggy code. Doing object oriented programming in C certainly does not make sense and is ugly. C is a low level language and not designed for it. You need to write alot of code in c for the equilivant in many other languages that are not as high level. C was designed to write device drivers and operating systems.
Early versions of gnome are examples of object oriented programming gone bad in C. Remember in the old days of starting gnome from a command prompt and seeing page upon page of errors? I believe newer versions of gnome have alot more C++ and perl code in the bonoboo objects. This is smart and wise. Also alot of the wheel was reinvented by implementing objecting oriented libraries in C when they were already available in C++.
This is why KDE took off. Now KDE is becomming too complex and cluttered and gnome is getting cleaner after they finished rewriting the api's and gnome itself from a clean start.
FYI, the FSF makes a Free version of Java. You do not need to depend on Sun or IBM.
http://saveie6.com/
why they decided to use the moniker "free" in FSF instead of Freedom is anyones guess really.
Could it be that freedom is a noun while free is an adjective?
i think there are enough mentions of "GNU" in the header files, man pages, about dialog boxes to show how embedded GNU is into Linux.
But it isn't for the sake of credit he wants GNU to be mentioned, it is to remind people of the free software ideals Linux alone does not represent.
The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out.
Don't get so worked up -- Michael Sims is an "editor" on a shoddy and unprofessional blog which most of the industry laughs at. If he was important or talented at all, it might be worth knocking him, but don't even devote the energy.
Wrote most of it.
Uh, I think you meant procedural not functional. Lisp is a functional programming language, C is a procedural language. There is a big difference - Linux and FreeBSD are definately not written in a functional language!
The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.
The name of the system is GNU.
GNU/Linux is the fork of the GNU OS which uses Linux as the OS kernel.
A GNU application might or might not require a GUI. Thus Xfree does not belong in the name of the system.
However, a particular GNU distribution, one targeting desktop users for instance, might depend on a particular GUI through its core user apps.
So "Debian/Xfree GNU/Linux" is correct while not "GNU/Xfree" is not.
(Just writing "Linux" ignores the possbility that there could be an embedded or propietary operating system, with its own toolchain and API's, which ran on a ported version of the Linux kernel).
Technically, precise system names should only be important if you are doing something like writing a research paper and want to make sure that your audience knows exactly what you are talking about (so they can duplicate your experimental setup and confirm your published results).
People who insist on using this kind of terminology in ordinary conversation most likely have sticks up their butts, as you suggest.
And, as product names go, "Linux" is a lot catchier than "GNU", imho.
--TRR
Yes, it sure would be ridiculous to think that emacs has crept into typical Linux distributions.
--- What