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20th Anniversary of RMS's Original GNU Post
An anonymous reader writes "Sep 27, 2003 is the 20th anniversary of Stallman's original Usenet post describing his vision of GNU. Good time for reflecting over GNU's successes and failures, about how it has changed our world."
Thank you RMS
It is a lesson to think big. We take GNU and Linux for granted today. 20 years ago the did not exist.
Think big and see what you can do with your life!
All HAIL RMS! Agree with him or not, his efforts have made your life better.
I think that the GNU project has brought software freedom to the masses and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. For computers to truly be a great asset to society, the software must be free and unhindered by any one entity or small group of entities. Indeed, the software must be owned by no one and should be used freely by society so that information can be exchanged without the influence of some corporate monopoly or oppressive government. GNU isn't just about free software, it is about the free exchange of ideas.
Smeghead every day of the week.
...try focusing on it being the "GNU GPL" instead of "GNU/Linux" and how GNU created the system of licencing that brought us Linux, which as more of a consequence also involved creating the first GPL'd programs. I think that would be more effective instead of focusing so much on the specific GNU utilities in a distribution.
People know their distribution (Red Hat), and the kernel (Linux). The "middleware" GNU will never be famous. But the GPL is, though the people that talk about it is a lot higher than those that have read it. That is not ment to undermine what they have achieved, it's just that sometimes I feel they're barking up the wrong tree...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That statement is so full of crap. Tha Free Software movement is, by definition, extremist.
How are the GNU ideals lessened for keeping the original views? The GNU project is about freedom, is not about taking over the desktop or making Microsoft go bankrupt. It's about CHOICE, and it has been extremely successful at that.
Do you run Linux, BSD or any othe UNIX clone? chances are that you are using the ls, grep, mv, cp, cd, find, etc versions from the GNU project. Have you ever realised the contribution made from RMS to your day to day work? Maybe if you don't use free software you will not notice, but a lot of us live from it, and we are thankful.
Even if we do not share the same political views as others we can benefit from their achivements. Their ideals may lead them to create and do wonderful things, and in this case RMS deserves all the respect and recognition we can give him.
Kudos to RMS!!! You may not share his views (I DO share them), but no one can argue he has helped to make this a better world
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Sticking to one's principles through thick and thin is extremist, eh?
Where I come from that was once called "integrity".
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
It goes to the old adage, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." By taking what is viewed by some to be an extreme position (not the concept, but the associated zealotry), I believe that RMS has alienated a significantly-sized group of people. Not because they don't like or agree with the concept, but that they disagree with his associated zealotry.
It's similiar to the reason why some people won't use qmail or djbns. It's not that they don't like the software, it's that they perceive the author to be an asshole.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
As I just posted a while ago in the preceding thread we have ESR representing the pragmatic point of view with the Open Source Initiative.
.RMS and his "no you won't, either" position.
I'd say this is a Good Thing and obviously so does most of the commercial world.
However, the middle ground is always defined by the end points. Move the end points to the right and the "moderate" point of view moves to the right right along with them. (Errrr, right?)
So, on one end of the field we have Microsoft and their "we intend to own it all" position and on the other end of the field you have. .
I don't care if he's a nut, whack job, unrealistic idealist, extremist radical or what have you.
But I do very much care that his flag stays staked very firmly, right where it is, and that someone is protecting it.
God bless the crazy old bastard for taking on the job.
KFG
I know you meant to be funny but...
OSS is indeed a gift to the world in every sense of the word.
Also have you ever read the credit list from a large project? It reads like a world phone book. People from all over the world, all religions, all races, all idiologies working together to make something. It would be remarkable in and of itself but the fact that they are doing it for free makes it nothing short of miraculous.
If that is not love then what is?
War is necrophilia.
A lot of the time, people on Slashdot complain about the passion that someone like RMS exhibits. Some even go so far as to call the passion a grudge. If that is what you wish to think of people like this, then let's take a trip through a few people who did great things soley because of a "grudge":
;)
1. The Americans who fought the revolutionary war and establish the United States of America
Grudge: They didn't like being bullied by the monarchy
2. Martin Luther King and the Civil rights movement.
Grudge: Many... Rosa Parks, the integration of public schools, etc...
3. Steve Jobs and his vision of a computer without IBM and corporate suits.
Grudge: He hated IBM.
4. Thomas Edison and his many inventions
Grudge: Life
5. SUBJECT LINE TROLL
Grudge: Slashdot posters
6. Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel
Grudge: The high cost of Unix
GNU will live on forever as classical music does. It may not be popular, but you can't argue that it is powerful, classic and has great beauty. Bravo RMS!
Un-news
Actually, MS and SCO have ideology. Its not so readily apparent because its the dominant ideology. "Business is good, propriatary code is good. Sale for profit is the only sensable way to live." Its odd to see it spelled out because it is usually simply part of the background...
RMS' ideology stands out because its different. So different that people can't really place it easily. Some people who quite obviously haven't given the matter any thought at all call it "communist" because it is definately not in line with taditioal capitalist ideology. But there are more options than just communist and capitalist. The idea of Free Software is patently not communist. It is different though. And, as you say, it needs constant statement simply because without constant restatement it would fade away due to the background ideology.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Looking back, I'd say RMS's two greatest contributions to the world are the GNU Public License and the GCC compiler.
The GPL attracted a whole bunch of people who are willing to contribute code, but not if someone could rip the code off, change a few things, and sell it in a broken state. This is one of the reasons for the great vitality of Linux and of GNU software. Also, the GPL makes companies like IBM willing to donate patents (such as the Read-Copy-Update patent) for use in free software; thanks to the GPL they know they can still sell a patent license if anyone wants to use the patent for a proprietary purpose.
GCC, on the other hand, made it possible for people to write free software without paying thousands of dollars for a compiler. It also served as a common language across all the *NIX platforms; if you were writing a utility, you could write to GCC instead of needing to work around the quirks of the various C compilers.
Linus Torvalds got the ball rolling on the Linux kernel, but he used GCC and the GPL to do it.
Thank you, RMS.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
umm, didn't these guys have grudge too?
7. saddam hussein - invaded kuwait in 1991.
grudge: who knows. because he could.
8. george w. bush - invaded iraq 2003.
grudge: who knows. because he could.
etc.
People call it communist because they are unable to hold complex thoughts in their heads.
For me the GNU manifesto is pretty damned close to the sermon on the mount. It's more Christian then communist.
War is necrophilia.
Why has it been 20 years, and HURD isn't ready for production use yet?
;-)
The design of HURD, on paper, is arguably better than a monolithic kernel such as Linux. But getting HURD working has proven difficult. Linux, on the other hand, started out as a toy that didn't do very much... but it was a toy that worked.
Thus Linux and not HURD benefitted from Mozilla's Law, which is: Projects that work get more attention than projects that don't work. It's a positive feedback loop: the more it works, the more people will get interested in it, and the more people are likely to contribute.
If I am correct about this guess, HURD should advance more quickly now, because it does now work.
It's possible that Linux has drawn developers away from HURD, simply because it was ready for production use long before HURD: for example, HURD isn't ready for IBM's customers to use it, so IBM isn't contributing developers to HURD, and they've already decided to support Linux anyway. I think to some extent this is true, but it can't be the whole story. There are multiple versions of BSD out there, and they seem to have active developer communities.
So, what's the situation with HURD? It's supposed to be really easy to develop it (e.g. as I understand it, almost everything happens in user space, so you can single-step even low-level stuff in the debugger). Did that turn out to be true, or not? If not, is it a temporary problem, or did HURD just not work out as hoped? Also, how easy is it to join the HURD development? How easy is it to get patches accepted? What is the HURD community like?
P.S. You will know HURD has "arrived" when SCO starts selling licenses to it...
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It took a geeky Scandanavian grad student with much more moderate views to take that on and do it.
I don't see what Linus' views have to do with anything.
Linus was just in the right place at the right time. Yes, his personality helps a lot because he is independent, fair, insightful, and humorous. But the real reason Linux exists is the GPL, which as I understand it comes from GNU and RMS.
RMS wants GNU to be the star. It's an institution he wants to continue, so he fights for it. But the real star of his philosophy has been the GPL. The widespread adoption of the license far surpasses the significance of his plan for GNU announced 20 years ago.
Most of the petulance of RMS comes, I think, from a misdirected belief that if we don't give credit to GNU for it's contributions to free software, then he has failed. The truth is, he has succeeded in laying the legal foundation and precedent for producing free software.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
For replacing every commonly-used utility in an operating system, it is impossible to coordinate a large number of people. But for development of one individual utility, the best way is through a versioning system with many developers working closely together.
If you confine yourself to stricly advocating gradual and "practical" changes, it is very easy to lose sight of the end goal. In the case of Libertarianism, the end goal is to eliminate all government and allow the world to operate on a completely unhampered free market; in Free Software, the goal is to "provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do--and thus make proprietary software obsolete." (as someone who believes in both these goals, I should point out that they are not contradictory ends: see Kinsella's Against Intellectaul Property.
Extremism only becomes a problem when those who adhere to a certain end (e.g., Free Software for every need or the elimination of government) reject any progress towards that goal as a sellout of that goal because such progress is step-wise. This is most certainly not what RMS has done.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Refusing to use proprietary graphics drivers would necessarily cut one off from using many Free Software programs. Without using proprietary graphics drivers, the vast majority of users would be unable to use Xfree86, GNOME, OpenOffice, GnuCash, and a variety of other programs that require a graphics card.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Actually, Lisp is an ideal platform for kick-ass windowing systems, such as CLIM. One key feature of CLIM is that the data sent to windows still remembers where it came from. As opposed to conventional window systems, where stuff either becomes pixels, or, if you are lucky, selectable as text.
RMS came from the AI lab at MIT, who were using Lisp machines as personal workstations before workstations even became common. These machines had OS's that had user-readable and user-modifiable code all the way down to and including the hardware microcode!
It's a shame that the UNIX model of "everything becomes an undifferentiated stream of byte-sized characters" took over the world. That world gives us solutions like Perl, which proliferate quick-and-dirty hacks that make all sorts of assumptions on the format of text streams to try to reconstruct the data hidden within them. When the assumptions fail (Y2K, anyone?) all sorts of things break.
Imagine if any time value anywhere in the system *understood* that it was a time. You could display it on the screen if you wanted, but you wouldn't use that text for processing, rather you would use the time value itself. Human display is separate from the machine representation. That is the idea behind CLIM.
Note: RMS doesn't fully get it, unfortunately. Consider Emacs, which has a Lisp-like extension language, but is unbelievably out-of-date. It uses default dynamic scope, which has been known since the 70s to be an ugly mistake, doesn't support packages, so names all have to have long prefixes, and doesn't fully use structured data types, so that all sorts of code depends on properly forming nested lists. But, RMS being RMS, he can't be persuaded to change his approach.