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20th Anniversary of RMS's Original GNU Post

Posted by michael on from the who-gnu? dept.

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."

5 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. Thanks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank you RMS

    1. Re:Thanks by rgmoore · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's not at all true. For a long time the FSF got most of its money by selling tapes of GNU code. They continue to sell copies of GNU software on their website, so RMS would be pretty hypocritical to criticize others for selling free software. (Hypocricy has never struck me as being one of RMS's failings; he's unusually true to his principles.) There's a page about selling free software on the FSF web site, and it should clear up confusion on this matter. The FSF positively encourages anyone who's distributing Free Software to charge as much for it as they think they can get away with. A particularly salient quote from that page (emphasis is theirs):

      So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it.

      That sure doesn't sound like an objection to selling software to me!

      --

      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  2. Dream come true. by FocaJonathan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. A suggestion for the next 20 years... by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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
  4. His greatest contributions: GPL and GCC by steveha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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