Free Software Foundation Turns 25

An anonymous reader writes "On this day, 25 years ago, Richard Stallman created the Free Software Foundation. He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tired of seeing software that he and others had written appropriated (without acknowledgment or compensation) by disreputable software companies and then told to pay for software they had written, Stallman took action, creating the foundation. The original license was written by Stallman. Stallman had subsequently written a large number of GNU tools, but the license was his most important contribution."

Comments

What about emacs

[nicolas.kassis]

GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.

Re:What about emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, vi is better.

Re:What about emacs

[yankpop]

GPL is cool but I think emacs was his greatest accomplishment. At least technical accomplishment.

Whoever modded this flamebait needs to have their privileges revoked. I'm not sure I agree with the parent post, but Emacs is unquestionably a substantial contribution in its own right, as is the GCC.

Flamebait is not a synonym for disagree.

Re:What about emacs

[Anonymous Coward]

Only emacs users go to Hell. All other sins are forgiveable.

Re:What about emacs

[LWATCDR]

Only a tiny percentage of people use Emacs.
Programers have the option of Vi, Eclipse.org, Netbeans, XCode, Notepad++, and any number of other free as in speech or beer IDEs.
Think of all the software that is available under the GPL including Linux.
Then think of all the software written using GCC.

While I do not agree with RMS's extremist dogmatic view that all software should be free, I tend to believe there is room for both models. I also really dislike his devoted followers.
But I will say this about him.
GPL was important in influenced a lot of people including myself to write and contribute free software. Emacs while I do not use it is a very powerful editor/ide/os/religion. GCC is wonderful and I use it often. And about the man himself. I wrote him an email once and he actually took the time to respond to me. I didn't agree with him but he was polite and passonate in his view point. I will say that my opinion of RMS is he is a gentalman that I respect but have an honest difference in opinion with.
 

Re:What about emacs

[Bigjeff5]

Technical accomplishments pale in comparison to cultural accomplishments.

Are you really arguing that emacs is a greater accomplishment than the entire open source software movement? GPL is what made OSS possible, without license the software would have been stolen before it could get off its feet. That's exactly what prompted the GPL in the first place - Stallman and his MIT buddies were writing software that vendors were picking up, incorporating into their own products, and then forcing Stallman and his buddies to pay for in the next iteration.

Re:What about emacs

[nicolas.kassis]

I guess you are probably right but I still think he doesn't get the cred he deserves as a genius programmer. Before the GPL he was single handedly reverse engineering all of Symbolics stuff as a way to screw them for taking code from MIT's mac project and close sourcing it. That code was written by teams of very good hackers. That + emacs + gcc == incredible code writing. Some of the best MIT Hackers still say they we impressed by how much code he was churning out during that time.

Dear Richard,

[Max Romantschuk]

Thank you.

Hrmph

[egibster]

I hate this article because I completely agree with it. I hate you.

The real question...

[grub]

Which came first, the Foundation or the Beard?

The GPL is the most important....

[GPLDAN]

...license or legal construction In the history of computing. Easily. It's not even close.



The Open Source movement owes its existence to it. Many a intellectual property lawsuit has been decided by it.

GCC

[schmidt349]

I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.

Thanks Richard for leaving your fingerprints on all of my object files! GCC is the awesome.

Re:GCC

[Bigjeff5]

GCC would not be important today at all without the license, because it would be proprietary software, therefore the license trumps it in my opinion. They are kinda two faces of the same coin though. Without GCC, the GPL probably would have never taken off at all.

So he's got two huge contributions, a lot of big ones (Linux was just GNU with Torvald's kernel at first), and then a bunch of crazy wacko rants.

Happy birthday to you,

[Rogerborg]

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, dear Richard,
Happy bir- COPYRIGHT VIOLATION DETECTED - TRANSMISSION TERMINATED

Uhm, no!

[kenh]

" He had been the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab.?

He was a system administrator, not the director of the lab! Minsky, Papert, et al didn't report to him...

Re:And it never would have amounted to anything...

[jedidiah]

Nope. The GNU tools were already being used to augment commercial Unixen and as a foundation for bootstrapping the development environments of alternate hardware platforms like video game consoles. Free Software was already making it's mark before Linux came along. Many of us were exposed to the GNU tools first and then to Linux later.

Dogma

[bigredradio]

Bethany: What is Stallman like?

Rufus: He likes to listen to people talk. I remember the old days when we were sittin' around the computer lab. You know, whenever we were goin' on about unimportant shit, He'd always have a smile on his face. His only real beef with programmers is the shit that gets carried out His name. Wars. Bigotry. Mobile Operating Systems. The big one though, is the factioning of the distros. He said, "Linux got it all wrong by takin' a good idea and building a belief structure out of it."

Bethany: So you're saying that having beliefs is a bad thing?

Rufus: I just think it's better to have an idea. You can change an idea; changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it. The whole of Free software is in jeopardy right now because of the Open Source belief system in this software as a service bullshit. RedHat and SuSE, whether they know it or not, are exploiting that belief, and if they're successful, you, me, all of this ends in a heartbeat. All over a belief.

Re:Director of the AI Lab?

[KlomDark]

Never heard of any of those guys. Stallman wins.

Re:the license? really?

[Bigjeff5]

GCC would not have mattered one lick without the license.

Really, it's just a C compiler. It's important, but rudimentary. Anybody with sufficient programming skills can write one for a given machine (and they do). The license was the stroke of genius. GCC only exists in its current form because of the license. Without it GCC would be just another compiler in the dustbin of history.

The real important contribution was the counter-culture he started, and that was only able to survive the extremely proprietary world of computers because of the license.

I don't even like Stallman (I think he's an asshole, frankly), but that's clearly one thing he got very right. It was a brilliant move to use the same copyright laws that were used to steal his (and his compatriates') software in order to ensure their software would be free to use by everyone forever.

In other words, open source software - GCC included - would likely not exist today without the GPL.