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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."

3 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. Original Post and Current Status of GNU by ccevans · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It is interesting to look at how the ideas in the post agree and disagree with the state of GNU today.

    For example, Stallman states that a kernel is a top priority, yet we still don't have a really stable, working kernel out of GNU (I don't think Mach or Hurd count).

    Also interesting - filename completion is mentioned as a possibility. Now it is difficult for many people, including myself, to live without it. Yet Stallman implies that a Lisp-based window system is more important. What became of this idea?

    By far, my favorite quote from this is:

    For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together.

    Is this not what GNU started? Many projects with part-time distributed workers? This is a quote from RMS, stating that the development model most open source projects now use would be very difficult.

  2. Who was "we"? by Klync · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What an inspiration! I have a question, though, and maybe RMS or someone else on this site would be able to answer this. No, it's not about how the first thing he mentions is a kernel and the last thing to actually be done (if you can even say that) is the kernel.

    It's about RMS switching between "I" and "we". What's up with that? Obviously this post is a shout-out to anyone interested in helping. But on that date, when RMS first shouted-out this revolutionary idea [chokes back tears, pauses to regain composure], who else was already involved? Who was this "we" he speaks of? Or was it a theoretical "we"? The Royal "we"?

    While I'm writing, can I just say once more to Richard, Linus, Rusty, Alan, and all the other* millions who have contributed their code in the spirit of the GNU project: A MILLION THANK YOU'S!! You have already changed the world!

    *If you're a big-kahuna-GNU/developer, please don't be offended that I left your name out. I love you too.

    --

    ----
    Not to be confused with Col.
  3. Re:Able to operate in a residential area? by leighklotz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He was talking about not wanting a Vax 780 or probably even a 750, which was what ARPA had declared to be the standard ARPA grant platform.

    For years, the GNU project ran on a Vax 750 called "prep.ai.mit.edu", but it was at MIT on the 7th floor of Tech Square, not in RMS's house (which burned down, by the way). Quite a few times I crashed prep by using the vt100 on top of it and typing ^P in Unix EMACS (as opposed to ITS EMACS on the PDP-10). ^P takes you to the machine boot ROM on a Vax -- equivalent to taking you to the BIOS immediately on an Intel PC.

    It was a while before I figured out how to recover and continue running Unix. So I probably lost the GNU project a few files due to fsck lossage...