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Stephen Fry Helps GNU Celebrate 25th Birthday
Virgil Tibbs writes "The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing 'Happy Birthday to GNU,' a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry. In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to 'good science' and contrasts it with the 'kind of tyranny' imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense and free software generally, for freedom's sake."
...is awesome. A breath of fresh air amongst a smog of thick idiots on UK TV.
Fortunately, utube have it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dcxtEKShXA
Red Leader Standing By!
Make mine a stiff one Stephen.
Absolutely. It's been 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote down that he was going to make a "GNU operating system", and he still hasn't made one.
My birthday isn't based on when my mother wrote to my father telling her she was going to go off and get pregnant by a cab driver called Terry.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I watched this and felt it was an opportunity lost. While Stephen's presentation was as impeccable as always, the content was distinctly lacking.
Firstly it was provided in the Ogg format. Yes, I know that's a "free" format, but what it isn't is a populist format. If you want to introduce new people to the tenets of GNU then providing them with a file format that is only used by the faithful is utterly pointless. Multiple formats including ogg would be the only sensible way to do this. I dare say more sensible people will distribute it in other formats, but it's an indicative triumph of pedantry over good sense.
Then the editing itself was somewhat amateurish. Those cuts to still photographs were pointless, irritating, and somewhat random. Even where they were somewhat pertinent (stephen talking about his first computer) they didn't seem to be correct (I may be wrong, but I doubt he started out with an IBM PC).
The tedious "Gnu/Linux" thing came up again. The childish demands that we call it that make the FSF look petty. It isn't accurate either - I have at least as much Apache, MIT, Mozilla, and BSD software on this machine as GNU and I'm damned if I'm going to pick a less elegant name just for Stallman's self-aggrandizement. We call it Linux because that's the major distinguishing feature. We'd call it GNU if they'd written a complete operating system. They didn't, so we don't. Get over it.
Finally as apparently novice users we are pointed to gNewSense, a distribution with virtually no mind-share and little community to support neophytes.
Loud klaxon, -100 points. Perhaps Alan Davies can take a swing at it?
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
because you're factually wrong. linux is a kernel. most of the utilities are from the gnu project.
... and there was me thinking Stephen Fry was your regular computer luddite.
On the contrary, he's famously geeky. He's proud of the fact that he was the second person in the UK to get a Mac. Given that the first was Douglas Adams that's quite a feat!
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Try using Linux without GNU tools.
Now try using GNU tools on other OSes. Which needs the other more? I'd think erring towards calling 'GNU' is actually more correct, but anyway, if you bothered to listen to the video Stephen does go on to describe Linux and GNU as the two central pillars of the free software movement.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
That toolset is what GNU, at first at least was. All the thousands of utilities that people think made up the OS once, in the days of the commandline OS.
Today it is far more complex, does a graphical shell, such as OSX, Windows, KDE count as part of the OS, or is it program that is run under the OS? Perhaps to make it clear is that until recently Microsoft had the graphical shell run on top of DOS. In the various GNU/Linux distro's this is still the case although quite a few distro's try to hide this by hiding the kernel output so that the user never sees anything but a number of graphical displays until they are in their favorite window manager.
So depending on your definition of what IS an operating system the statement in the movie that the GNU OS is 25, is correct.
Car anology, you use the steering wheel to operate the wheels, this is obvious and clear cut, but where you draw the line between the part that control the wheels and the wheels themselves? Is there even a line because you could also say that the wheel+wheels together allow you to control the car.
But of course, the trolls now are happily hammering on the fact that Hurd is still a dream and that Richard Stallman is claiming things that aren't true. Well they have to of course because they can't put a dent into the fact that GNU tools are an essential part of linux, BSD, OS-X. We forget just how often we use simple GNU tools every day we use one of these operating systems.
It is like a car nut who thinks the rubber on his wheels is not important.
25 years ago, when nobody had yet heard of Linus Torvald, long before DRM and the RIAA, one guy had a vision of free software, software not controlled by anyone company but by the community. It was a revolutionary idea in a time when you rented all your computer access and most people still thought computers where things in big boxes that bleeped and one company even thought that the market for the PC could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Long before Microsoft and WGA, Richard Stallman saw that free software might be the only way to give us some measure of control over who owned the information age.
That is an achievement and something to celebrate. So, the GNU kernel is still missing in action, that is why this movie talks about both GNU the OS and Linux the kernel working together.
But I suppose it is the nature of trolls to latch onto one tiny details and then blow it out of proportion.
Congrats GNU, here is to the next 25 years of software free from whatever the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wish to impose on us next.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Go have a look at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
You'll find he is open and honest, and gives credit where it is due. He does NOT claim to have written the whole thing.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
Because this is about GNU, not linux. There is a very real and important difference. Linux is a kernel, GNU is a set of tools that you can use NOT just with linux but with all sorts of unixes including of course BSD.
But because a lot of people have no idea about what GNU is, we should pamper to them and call it something completely different, adding a couple of years to a linux distro. If they had celebrated the 25th birthday of Linux you would no doubt be pointing out that linux ain't 25.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Take a look at the average Linux distribution. Count the total amount of source code from Linux. Now count the total contribution from the GNU project. It's probably somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude bigger. You can trivially replace the kernel. In Debian you can replace the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD kernel with Linux system call compatibility, and no one will notice. Try removing all of the GNU code and see if people still think it's the same operating system. I'm not just talking about the shell (although most 'Linux' init scripts are full of bashisms, so good luck booting without the GNU shell), or the GNU loader (good luck running any programs without that. You could use statically-linked binaries, although that would be hard without the GNU linker). I'm not even just talking about the GNU core utilities (you know, the ones POSIX and SUS say every compliant operating system must include), or the C compiler. I'm not even just talking about GNU libc, which is almost as much code as the kernel by itself. I'm talking about all of these. The things that take a kernel and turn it into a usable system.
If you really think that the Linux kernel is important, try building a POSIX-compliant system without it. Or don't, just look at any of the half-dozen Free Sofware operating systems which manage it already. Then try building one without any GNU tools. Even Darwin / OS X includes a big chunk of GNU code. I think OpenSolaris can just about function without any GNU code (although the Solaris utilities are so horrible it's only really tolerable with the GNU ones installed over the top). Building a Linux-based system without any GNU code is even harder - I don't know of anyone who has managed it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Absolutely. It's been 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote down that he was going to make a "GNU operating system", and he still hasn't made one.
What do you call all that stuff that runs on top of the Linux kernel? Just because Hurd was crap does not mean that RMS didn't accomplish what he set out to do. Even if he wasn't the "creator" of Linux, his efforts certainly produced the "enabler" of Linux. The fact remains that Linux wouldn't really be Linux without GNU.
Maybe I'm wrong. I suppose it's possible Mr. Wildebeest had nothing to do with GNU/Linux, or that the whole moon landing thing actually WAS faked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computer_science)
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
Linux isn't claimed by Stallman. Distributions of Linux, which use GNU libc, the GNU loader, the GNU shell and the GNU toolchain, to build and run all of their programs are claimed by Stallman. Without a libc and a loader, a kernel is pretty useless. In terms of volume of code, the GNU components required to launch a useful program are larger than the Linux components, and yet you feel it's fair to call the compound entity 'Linux?' He doesn't ask you to call it GNU/Linux if you're using uclibc, your own loader, and zsh, for example, but if the core of the system is made almost entirely of GNU code then calling it 'Linux' is a slap in the face to all of the GNU developers. Not that I'd object to slapping a few of the GNU libc developers in the face...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nobody (not even RMS) is trying to brand Linux as a GNU project. What they *have* been trying to include is the GNU brand into the entire working system. In fact RMS is very careful to point out that the kernel is *not* part of GNU.
If you are just downloading the kernel, then I don't think *anyone* would suggest that you call it anything other than Linux. But what on earth would you do with it? Do you understand what the kernel does? You'd have absolutely no way of interacting with your computer! Even if you add X, you couldn't bloody run it without a shell.
There are a whole host of other programs that need to run in order for you to do *anything at all*. Now, you don't have to use GNU for these programs. There are many other programs you *could* use. But almost everyone uses GNU (and not just with the Linux kernel). The fact that it is so ubiquitous has kind of led it to be invisible. Which is why they are trying to point out that they exist.
I've thought about it a long time. I'm careful to give GNU and the FSF proper credit for their role. And I'm technical enough to truly understand what that role is. But as your continued posts show exceedingly well, most others have no understanding at all -- even when it is explained to them.
So I think it's not an effective thing to be doing. The FSF should probably understand the huge contribution they have made and resign themselves to the fact that most others won't understand. Whether it is fair or not, I don't think we're going to change this reality.
I have a lot of respect for Stallman and GNU. My take on the GNU/Linux thing has always been this: It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, and something I'm simply not going to do. "Linux" is the name I use for the system, it's short and convenient, and I'm not going to complicate it just for the sake of accuracy any more than I'm going to say "facial tissue" instead of kleenex. Linux is just a noun to me.
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