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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
"Imagine in 20 years when this makes the front page of Slashdot on a Saturday morning at 1am. I bet no one will see it."
What is Usenet? What are newsgroups? Your opinions and thoughts please.
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!
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:
RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
What's an "ARPA", and why wont Network Solutions let me register one!?!?!
has been teaching us to love again. *sniff*
--------
Free your mind.
All HAIL RMS! Agree with him or not, his efforts have made your life better.
Although he talks about his ideology, the focus of his post is on the software. When I read about anything he's said in the last few years, it's always ideology, with a little bit about the software thrown in. Might the GNU project be better served if their leaders would stop worrying about whether it should be called GNU/Linux and get back to the technical side of things?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:
RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
Usenet:
Raise your hand if you ever had a "bang-path" email address. For that matter, raise your hand if you know what a bang-path address is.
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.
From the post:
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things.
Dreaming of world domination was obviously among the top priorities already at that point... ;)
...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
Until The Hurd finally reaches beta
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:
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.
Stallman's vision for GNU has stayed remarkably consistent. He has am overriding definition of value - "free is better", everything since has been a result of that. The dislike of the business world for the GPL is not a setback for RMS, his goal is Free Software, so the fact that it is now interested does not mean he is going to sell out his principles and do anything to get businesses to use his software.
I admire that. Although I use a lot of prorietary software (and tend toward the pragmatic over principle) I'm glad that RMS chose to start GNU and stuck with it so long.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
It almost seems that you guys are happy that he did not actually succeed. Was it the word "humanity" that turned you off?
Must-not-watch TV!
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.
Two details stuck out to me from that posting:
1) there was actual email "arpanet mail" back in '83
2) they were calling it "snail" mail back in '83 (while I was still in pre-school)
Jeez, I feel really behind the curve.
Transistors and Beer!!
See for yourself... in his personal ad
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.
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!
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...
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
In 1983, I remember the PDP-11 was on the way out and the VAX computer was on the way in. I was at Berkeley then; BSD was still nastily entangled with AT&T code.
I worked at Lawrence Berkeley Labs part time during the school year and full time during summers. We ran our entire building off of a single VAX 11/780. It was about four feet high, three feet deep, and maybe 15 feet long, and it had the processing power of One MIP, and we were lucky to have it. The external disk drives were about the size of a washing machine. I don't imagine any VAX from that era would run in a residential setting. (Maybe an 11/730?)
RMS came to talk to the Berkeley Computer club. It might have been that year; I don't think he'd officially started GNU yet. About a dozen of us took him out to sushi; I remember thinking he was an anticapitalist nut. (I've changed my opinion since.)
That was the year the Macintosh came out; they had two models, one with 128k and one with 512k. A lot of "real programmers" scoffed at them, but some people praised the excellent interface.
But maybe you could get an old PDP 11/70, and run it in your garage. It probably ran off of 110 volts, and didn't need special cooling or a special room with a raised floor. Sure, it was 16 bit, but those were what all the early Berkeley Unix code was written on. We had a bunch of them! Imagine running 30 interactive users on something less powerful than your cellphone today, and you'll be about right.
So where's that Empire game you promised?
If RMS is a "nutso prophet," ESR is the televangelist version. :-)
-- Henry Spencer
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
Twenty years ago I was 11. By then I already had 5 years of coding experience, mostly assembly, and a bit of Basic. Everything I knew about code came from reading books, reading other people's Basic code, and disassembling binaries. At no point was I actually aware that there were people out there fighting to make possible what I largely took for granted... the complete availabilty of source code as well as the unrestricted ability to read, modify, and distribute it.
As an adult, I nearly gave up coding altogether. I felt like a farmer without my own land. I owned no share of the programming tools that I used daily. All the API's were immutable, opaque, and hostile (VFW comes to mind).
Then I found Linux, and from there, the FSF and GNU. Beyond a doubt, without the work of Stallman and everyone fighting for Open Source, I'd be doing anything but writing code today. And aside from my family, few things are more integral to who I am than writing software. I was born to code.
So thank you Richard! It took me awhile to find everyone, but now that I'm here, I'm glad you started when you did. That said, if we had to start from scratch today, I would be part of it.
-Hope
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.
RMS Interview in Wired
Here is a link to RMS when he appeared on The ScreenSavers
Which is why the word radical itself has been demonized.
The current mode of attack seems to be being formed into a trident.
One prong is trying to force GPLed code either into the public domain or claim it as propriatary (SCO's attack). The middle prong will replace it with the BSD license which allows propriatizing open code. The third prong is trying to pretend that fully propriatary code is actually Open Source ( a weird combo of MS and Sun).
I've been trying to imagine a more extreme position than Microsoft's "our fair share is 100%," but I can't.
May you live in interesting times.
KFG
Uh, the original idea _was_ political, as he says right here. Excerpt: "This operating system was launched to be about politics, starting with its announcement 20 years ago this month"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I sure hope not. We all know how much safer the typical C and C++ programs are.
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
Anyone digging Douglas Adams just has to wonder how this filesize came about. Divine intervention? Or just an auspicious sign :)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
My job leads me to deal with software vendors on a regular basis, and many of them have been hostile or dismissive of Linux and the GPL - such companies don't get our business and some have later changed their minds, but the attitude exists.
My other experience with this has been that a contractor released a work for hire under the GPL without my companies permission, this has created a credibility problem with management regarding the GPL and halted later attempts to release anything under the GPL.
My employer is not a software publishing house, but we do wind up consuming and producing a fair amount of software anyway. MS encourages us to use their software in order to get their business and this sort of quid pro quo makes more sense to most business types than the "hippy nonsense" of the GPL.
My experience might not be typical, but from what I read and hear it is fairly common.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
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.
But that doesn't mean they were social rejects lacking the ability to communicate concepts to their fellow man without bristling every person they met. It doesn't mean they espoused ideologies with technology and tried to use their innovations as a way to force normative concepts and judgements down people's throats as payment for their work. They didn't loudly shout people down who didn't adhere to their preferred terminology for certain concepts and tried to engage them in discussion
RMS is neither a social reject nor is he incapable of communicating clearly. And the last time I checked, RMS wasn't shouting loudly at anyone about terminology. He's simply repeated something which he thinks is true. No-one has to read it, and surely old-timers have all read it already. But the world of Free Software haven't, and should be educated about such things.
The simple fact is that RMS is right. People are afraid to talk about freedom, or anything so controversial.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Man and Superman (1903) "Maxims for Revolutionists"
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.
My friends and I gave a barbeque in Austin, Texas for RMS when he came for a speaking engagement. It was kind of like barbequing for Napoleon. He scarfed down the best ribs on the planet, treated his hosts and our guests like peasants, and as he left snarled, "IT'S GNULINUX!" and left his spit on my cheek upon his exit. He also paid too much attention to the hosts' 15-year-old daughter and whined too much about not being able to find a girlfriend in front of a woman he knew cared for him. I have a problem with him being called an ideologist. I do not think a person's accomplishments give them license to treat people badly. If he is perceived as an asshole, it is because he is an asshole. I would think someone as intelligent as he is would consider peoples' perception of him, but I really do not think he gives a damn about people's feelings. He is all about himself and the credit he gets. He also forgets to mention the key people that helped him in the beginning. All of these "All hail RMS" statements will do nothing but inflate his monumental ego. It is more than obvious to me that he doesn't bother with manners. We also barbequed for Eric Raymond twice because he is fun and a genuinely warm human being. We are looking forward to spending time with him again.
the loudest words are the ones we never say