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Interview With Richard Stallman

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday January 4, 2005 @02:54AM from the men-with-beards-talking dept.

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating and lengthy interview with Richard Stallman who founded the GNU Project in 1984, and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. He also originally authored a number of well known and highly used development tools, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB) and GNU Emacs. The interview covers a wide range of topics, from rms's early years, to his current role in the Free Software Foundation. He discusses the current state of GNU/Hurd, the problems with non-free software, and much more."

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Re:GNU/Linux? No. by bgat · 2005-01-04 04:08 · Score: 4, Informative

Uli didn't start with nothing. So by definition, his work is part of GNU libc. Uli also didn't work gratis, his work was compensated by Red Hat.

GNU libc had reached a state where it was too substantial for volunteer maintainers to make more progress (though I'll readily admit those volunteers did an amazing job getting libc to that point). Red Hat paid someone to turn it into a product for them.

Uli is hardly a saint. And don't get me started on my personal run-ins with the guy.

As for egcs, same story but s/Red Hat/Cygnus Solutions/.

Short version: GNU needed some heavy lifting. Some enlightened members of corporate America stepped up to the plate.

And in doing so, proved RMS right and put Linux on the map at the same time. GNU/Linux.

--
b.g.