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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.
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
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.
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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!
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