New Unix Implementation Turns 30

Thirty years ago, rms wrote: "Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed." And thus began the revolution. Thirty years after posting the initial announcement, it's hard to find someone who hasn't interacted with Free Software at some point, even if they didn't realize it. To celebrate, the FSF is holding an anniversary celebration and hackathon this weekend at MIT.

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. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.

Who Am I?

I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.

Why I Must Write GNU

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.

How You Can Contribute

I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.

One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.

Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.

If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.

For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:

• RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA

Usenet:

• ...!mit-eddie!RMS@OZ
• ...!mit-vax!RMS@OZ

Comments

Megalomanic

[CurryCamel]

"Ima gonna write a new unix". That's One Huge Task. Weird thing is - he pulled it off. Hats off to RMS. And thanks.

Re:Megalomanic

[Squiddie]

That's the power of autism.

Re:Megalomanic

[cold fjord]

"Ima gonna write a new unix". That's One Huge Task.

It was a much smaller task at the time.

It's worth remembering that Unix got its start as more or less as a fun project - there wasn't a plan to conquer the world.

Re:Megalomanic

[DeKO]

Good troll, sir. Try removing everything except /boot, see how much your computer can do.

Re:Megalomanic

[poet]

No. He didn't. Was he a part of it? Absolutely but GNU has never produced a usable unix or unix like operating system and it certainly wasn't RMS it was hundreds of thousands of free software and open source developers.

Ask yourself, "What software projects does RMS devote his time too?". To my knowledge, not many if any. He is a great advocate and he has done many things for our community but he did not complete what he set out to do.

Re:Megalomanic

[cyborg_zx]

Don't need money, don't need fame,
Don't need no credit card to ride this train,
It's strong and it's sudden, it can be cruel sometimes,
But it might just change your life,
That's the power of Austim.

Re:Megalomanic

[Zero__Kelvin]

"It's worth remembering that Unix got its start as more or less as a fun project - there wasn't a plan to conquer the world."

I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected. Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun. You don't write a proposal and ask a company like AT&T to spend millions to have fun.

Furthermore, 30 years ago was 1983, meaning that Unix had been around for about 13 years already, and had already forked into BSD Unix and AT&T System V. It was already quite huge by that time.

Re:Megalomanic

[aardvarkjoe]

Ask yourself, "What software projects does RMS devote his time too?". To my knowledge, not many if any. He is a great advocate and he has done many things for our community but he did not complete what he set out to do.

Although to my understanding that's true today, he was largely responsible for several important projects, including emacs and gcc. The GNU project never achieved all of its goals, but his software contributions are integral to the free Unix(-like) operating systems of today.

Re: Megalomanic

[SpaghettiPattern]

You think Linux would have come this soon without GNU? Do you think early versions of Linux could have done without GanU? Do you really think one guy will write a FULL os on his own? All programs, all docs, distro etc...
Any huge achievement is a term work. Some members will be better. Some will get more exposure. Some will be awarded more. But in the end a team or community does it together.
I take my hat off to rms and to all contributors. Without you guys I'd probably be still at the mercy of businesses with undisclosed agendas.

Re:Megalomanic

[Skiron]

AS I said on here before - if it wasn't for GCC (or the Gnu C compiler as it was then) written by RMS, then Linus couldn't have even started doing his stuff with linux.

RMS is the seed of *all* the free open source code/projects available now (and in the future). He is GOD and well done to him and his principles.

Re:Megalomanic

[Stormbringer]

Are you saying he should have released it under an Autistic License?

Re:Megalomanic

[Zero__Kelvin]

I have also pointed out that GCC was was quintessential to the Open Source movement. That is completely besides the point, since the claim was that he succeeded in implementing a complete OS called GNU. He is definitely not GOD by any stretch of the imagination, and he definitely did not succeed in his original goal.

Re:Megalomanic

[cold fjord]

"It's worth remembering that Unix got its start as more or less as a fun project - there wasn't a plan to conquer the world."

I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected

Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun.

You didn't get much right in your reply, in fact much of it is backwards. Allow me to correct you. They originally requested a computer to write an operating system, but that was denied. They then bootlegged a computer, wrote a game, and hacked on an operating system without it being an official project, and eventually got buy-in to buy a computer to build a text processing system, not an operating system. Unix was already in existence by the time they were allowed to purchase a computer for the text processing system. (I will also note that as a monopoly they were under very tight restrictions about what they could do with Unix in terms of sales.) From the above paper:

Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' ....

Also during 1969, Thompson developed the game of `Space Travel.' First written on Multics, then transliterated into Fortran for GECOS (the operating system for the GE, later Honeywell, 635), it was nothing less than a simulation of the movement of the major bodies of the Solar System, with the player guiding a ship here and there, observing the scenery, and attempting to land on the various planets and moons. The GECOS version was unsatisfactory in two important respects: first, the display of the state of the game was jerky and hard to control because one had to type commands at it, and second, a game cost about $75 for CPU time on the big computer. It did not take long, therefore, for Thompson to find a little-used PDP-7 computer with an excellent display processor; the whole system was used as a Graphic-II terminal. He and I rewrote Space Travel to run on this machine. The undertaking was more ambitious than it might seem; because we disdained all existing software, we had to write a floating-point arithmetic package, the pointwise specification of the graphic characters for the display, and a debugging subsystem that continuously displayed the contents of typed-in locations in a corner of the screen. All this was written in assembly language for a cross-assembler that ran under GECOS and produced paper tapes to be carried to the PDP-7. ...

Space Travel, though it made a very attractive game, served mainly as an introduction to the clumsy technology of preparing programs for the PDP-7. Soon Thompson began implementing the paper file system (perhaps `chalk file system' would be more accurate) that had been designed earlier. A file system without a way to e

Re: Megalomanic

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true people! There were no C compilers before gcc -- sure, the C language was created back in the earliest days of UNIX, but there was no compiler -- if you wanted your C code compiled, you had to mail it to Dennis Ritchie and, when he got around to it, he'd compile it by hand (with pencil, paper, and an opcodes list) then send you a tape with the resulting object code -- by the time Linus was ready to start his kernel, Ritchie was so swamped there'd be no way to get a project of that magnitude compiled! (Good thing Andrew Tanenbaum got in early having Ritchie compile the first version of ACK, so he had his own compiler for MINIX, huh?) There definitely wasn't any compiler, and particularly not a portable C compiler, being shipped with either AT&T or Berkeley UNIX.

TL;DR: shut up, you miserable mushbrain. RMS's worst enemy isn't the people who (whether out of ignorance, malice, or an honest disagreement of the relative importance of kernel and userland) refuse to acknowledge the presence of some GNU in GNU/Linux, but ignorant louts like you loudly giving him too much credit, which feeds the "arrogant jackass who demands credit for everything whether he did it or not" meme.

Re: Megalomanic

[dfghjk]

Adoption would have happened sooner if it weren't for an AT&T lawsuit only it wouldn't have been Linux, it would have been BSD. So yes, absolutely.

BSD was far more advanced and would have remained so, all without GNU. There was demand and interest PLUS a mature non-GNU codebase. There was a legal cloud over it that didn't resolve until Linux gain sufficient momentum. Without lawsuit troubles, GNU and Linux would likely have never existed AND we'd be better off.

Listing RMS as first among "all contributors" is an insult to all contributors. RMS hasn't been a contributor for a long, long time. His "contributions" are politics, increasing license restrictions, and renaming other people's products to give himself glory.

Re:Megalomanic

[lightBearer]

I believe the interesting part of that article was this:

Space Travel, though it made a very attractive game, served mainly as an introduction to the clumsy technology of preparing programs for the PDP-7. Soon Thompson began implementing the paper file system (perhaps `chalk file system' would be more accurate) that had been designed earlier. A file system without a way to exercise it is a sterile proposition, so he proceeded to flesh it out with the other requirements for a working operating system, in particular the notion of processes. Then came a small set of user-level utilities: the means to copy, print, delete, and edit files, and of course a simple command interpreter (shell). Up to this time all the programs were written using GECOS and files were transferred to the PDP-7 on paper tape; but once an assembler was completed the system was able to support itself. Although it was not until well into 1970 that Brian Kernighan suggested the name `Unix,' in a somewhat treacherous pun on `Multics,' the operating system we know today was born.

...this came after descriptions of how the original authors tried to get permission from Bell Labs to construct this thing. Instead, they built it on discarded hardware. This origin was not exactly company sanctioned.

Re:Megalomanic

[pscottdv]

In what way did he not "pull it off"? He never said he was going to do it alone. Right in the post he asks for lots of help. His goal was to have a free operating system and that's what he got.

If you mean that he didn't pull it off in precisely the order he announced he would, I guess that would be correct.

Re:Megalomanic

[Dogtanian]

That still doesn't change the fact that RMS did not re-implement UNIX as the summary suggests. UNIX user-space utilities are useful, yes, but are not UNIX in themselves.

It's a shame that the borderline trollish aspects of your original post distracted from the legitimate point it *did* make- that RMS and the GNU project were *not* responsible for the most popular GPL kernel (i.e. Linux).

On the other hand, they kicked off the whole thing and were responsible for a *significant* proportion of the utilities that make that kernel into a proper OS. And it's quite possible- if not probable- that had Stallman not created and popularised the GPL that Linux would never have been released under anything resembling the GPL. (It's worth remembering that early versions of Linux had a noncommercial-use-only license; according to Wikipedia "Torvalds has described licensing Linux under the GPL as the "best thing I ever did." ".)

Would people have been so willing to contribute to Linux under the original license terms? Would it have ever taken off?

So, to reverse Stallman's usual bugbear, it's not just GNU, it's, er... Linux/GNU. But ultimately, beyond who gets credit for what, that's not that big a deal- RMS and the GNU project didn't write it, but they certainly do deserve the credit for creating the GPL it's licensed under, something which probably benefited Linux as much as Linux benefited GNU and free software in general. Stallman himself acknowledges that Linux meets the need for a free kernel and that finishing Hurd is no longer essential. (Ironically, I'm guessing that the success of Linux probably attracted developers who might otherwise have worked on the Hurd).

So it's a win-win situation; beyond the very worthwhile software that the GNU project created, its popularisation of the GPL encouraged a whole lot more- including Linux.

Re:Megalomanic

[Zero__Kelvin]

Posting as an AC when you are clearly "cold fjord" does not qualify you as an "outside observer"

Re:Megalomanic

[Guy Harris]

Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs

Well, they weren't that interested in funding it at the start; to quote Mr. Ritchie:

Actually, it is perfectly obvious in retrospect (and should have been at the time) that we were asking the Labs to spend too much money on too few people with too vague a plan. Moreover, I am quite sure that at that time operating systems were not, for our management, an attractive area in which to support work. They were in the process of extricating themselves not only from an operating system development effort that had failed, but from running the local Computation Center. Thus it may have seemed that buying a machine such as we suggested might lead on the one hand to yet another Multics, or on the other, if we produced something useful, to yet another Comp Center for them to be responsible for.

They may have been willing to let some of their researchers spend some of their company time on personal projects, but it wasn't as if AT&T were starting a major official project to develop an OS. So it's a question of the level of the support. From what Ritchie said, it appears to have been a bit of a skunkworks project at the beginning, although, at some point, AT&T management Took Notice and started putting more money into it (especially after it became an OS supporting many significant applications inside AT&T).

and the C language was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it.

The reference doesn't directly address that, although when it says

Thus, in 1971, work began on what was to become the C language [14]. The story of the language developments from BCPL through B to C is told elsewhere [15], and need not be repeated here. Perhaps the most important watershed occurred during 1973, when the operating system kernel was rewritten in C. It was at this point that the system assumed its modern form; the most far-reaching change was the introduction of multi-programming. There were few externally-visible changes, but the internal structure of the system became much more rational and general. The success of this effort convinced us that C was useful as a nearly universal tool for systems programming, instead of just a toy for simple applications.

that seems to indicate that C was used as a language for "simple applications" prior to its use as an implementation language for Unix.

Re: Megalomanic

[SpaghettiPattern]

I agree that perhaps without the lawsuit BSD would have been further ahead. But you cannot deny the impact the GPL has had. GPL plays the license game in order to make game fairer. The BSD license has very little restrictions and would be the better option in a fairer, utopian world.

IMHO RMS has earned his place to come first in the list of contributors. He initiated the free (as in libre) software movement and continues to back it up. The easier route for a guy of his "caliber" would have been to go commercial and to cash in huge amounts of money in the last 30+ years. He refrained from that. How many others can say that?

Re: Megalomanic

[marcello_dl]

> Without lawsuit troubles, GNU and Linux would likely have never existed AND we'd be better off.

Why all the whine? BSD was way more successful than GNU, and you can reap the benefits of the "complete freedom of the developer" model, today -> buy a mac, comrade consumer.

Re:Megalomanic

[TheRaven64]

I'm neither cold fjord nor the AC, but you are entirely wrong. The current project that I work on is headed by Peter Neumann (one of the architects of MULTICS), and so I have a fairly good understanding of the environment that led to the creation of UNIX from conversations with someone who was there at the time. Pretty much everything that cold fjord said is correct. They got an old computer that no one else wanted and hacked up an OS in their own spare time. They didn't aim to take over the world - they just wanted something that had the bits of MULTICS that they liked (Peter has some frank opinions on their choices here) that they could use.

Re:Megalomanic

[TheRaven64]

Yup. And he's right...

Re:30 years on

[Stormwatch]

That bit's been hard to get right, but some Finnish guy cobbled up something you can use while they finish this.

Raise a glass to you, RMS

[dkleinsc]

I was actually planning on installing Debian tonight on a spare box, completely unaware of this anniversary. Now I pretty much have to do it.

Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS

[KiloByte]

So here's a port for you to run.

Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS

[spike_gran]

He may not have accomplished everything he set out to do, but, he certainly accomplished a great deal.

And while RMS and GNU alone didn't succeed at creating a free software OS and development stack, they got the ball rolling, and it exists now.

Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS

[Darinbob]

BSD wasn't a free software OS for a long time. It included significant parts of licensed AT&T code and you could not get BSD without also having a Unix license. Even for those programs implemented originally as part of BSD you still needed a license to get access to the source code and sys admins would have it locked up tight. Even a CS student at a university might need special permission and a project to get access. Things opened up tremendously after AT&T code was scrubbed out, but that was after GNU started.

Where can I get this?

[moonwatcher2001]

> Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it.
and
>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

He started working on it 30 years ago so it must be available somewhere. Where can I get the GNU kernel? What hardware does it run on?

Re:Where can I get this?

[morcego]

For what it's worth:

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/

Re:Where can I get this?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The GNU kernel - for people who think Linux is just too damn user friendly!

Re:Where can I get this?

[girlintraining]

"One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date." So, exactly how many PDP-11's have *you* donated?...

None. GCC already supported compiling for the PDP-11. It has since March, 2002 according to the patch notes for GCC. Which, let's be honest -- getting hardware support into the compiler a mere 5 years after the line was discontinued is remarkably fast for the GNU project.

I'm still waiting for the day they include a warning when you derp a sizeof(x) into your code, when you really wanted a sizeof(*x) , something Visual Studio will happily warn me about when compiling something. Of course, gcc does what the code tells it to and reports the bytelength of a pointer variable (how useful!) without complaint, whereas Visual Studio will happily explode my system, then run screaming out of the hole with toilet paper stuck to its foot yelling "Why did you use that win32 call when, although we didn't bother putting it in the documentation, it was depreciated 8 years ago and replaced with seven other similar-sounding functions, equally badly documented and not backwards-compatable!" ...

So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features, warnings, etc., but when you merely go for shooting your own foot, it instead blows your whole leg off, then drops a bomb on your head while muttering something about upgrading to the latest .NET and dll versions...

Re:Where can I get this?

[pesho]

Yeah, what have RMS and GNU ever done for us.

Re:Where can I get this?

[serviscope_minor]

So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features,

Wait what? Compared to gcc, VS has all the features?

Which planet do you hail from?

GCC has complete C99 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has complete C++11 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has a more complete support of C++14 than VS.

gcc is a far, far more up to date compiler than visual studio.

[*]I'm going to keep calling it FORTRAN for ever. suck it.

Today

[girlintraining]

"Free Unix! Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed."

If someone said that today, he'd be promptly sued by SCO, dragged into dark cavernous courtrooms filled with patent trolls, accused by the government of being a terrorist, and laughed at by the mainstream community of UNIX-like OS users, such as the ones reading this post; Absent Linux, we'd all be warring over which was better -- Macintosh or Windows. Both have UNIX buried in their guts.

My point is that RMS' achievement, organizing people into a cohesive political movement loosely termed 'open source', probably couldn't happen today. It is therefore particularly important that he did so thirty years ago, before the global international business and government communities were aware of the potential impact of his activities.

There are fewer and fewer like him every year -- old schoolers who grew up with the fervent belief that the internet, computers, all this digital technology, could empower, enlighten, and educate millions. And then set about proving just that. These days... the majority of people are content to watch Youtube videos of cats, and try not to see any potential beyond immediate gratification and entertainment. It's sad that the hacker ethic has become in such short supply, even within this community. Back then, nobody would think any less of you for going off on your own to reinvent the wheel... your peers thought, at worst, that it might be good practice for you. Today, it's a face full of rage and religious views if you even suggest things may not be as good as they could be.

Re:Today

[Anonymous Coward]

>Absent Linux, we'd all be warring over which was better -- Macintosh or Windows.

Really? What about the BSDs? Since I'm using those, I think they'd be in the argument for lots of folks who like Unix and open source software.

Re:Today

[mark-t]

Absent Linux, there'd still be FreeBSD.

Re:Today

[girlintraining]

RMS has nothing to do with "open source". Sad that to this day trolls and idiots keep intentionally attributing it to him, in order to misinform. Do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.

He was the principle author of the GNU GPL, the first real open source license. The entire open source movement is based on licensing; That's how open source is defined -- by licensing terms. And RMS was the first to come up with a license that captured this essential quality and formalized it. Richard Stallman wants to use the term "free software" instead of "open source", but that doesn't make me a troll for using a different term for it than he does.

A pity so many Anonymous Cowards love replying to me with a casual "STFU" and claim I know nothing, it's off topic, etc., and people believe them. Further proof of the sad, sad state slashdot has descended into... that an informed and long-time contributor to the community gets mod-bombed while the trolls get up-modded.

Re:Today

[jedidiah]

> RMS has nothing to do with "open source".

"open source" is primarily just corporate friendly branding for Free Software. It's primarily a marketing job to accentuate the pragmatic benefits of Free Software over the political motivations RMS might tend to focus on.

Re:Today

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS has some controversy, but I do remember in the early 1990s what was out there, UNIX-wise.

You had XENIX, ULTRIX, IRIX, A/UX, AIX PS/2, AIX/370, Dell UNIX, SunOS, and many other flavors. Almost none came with source, and if they did (Mt. Xinu was the only BSD that did), you had to get a special license for SVR4 programs.

If you wanted header files and libraries, pay up. C compiler? Better have that cash for the flexlm key. C++? Pony up a couple grand.

Had it not been for RMS and gcc, access to a C compiler would have been the bottleneck for most world software development.

Before 1991 and Jolitz and Linus inventions, if you were a college student and wanted to see a "#" prompt on a computer, good luck unless your blackhat skillz were good. Even just getting a "$" prompt (or a "%" prompt if you were a novice) took some doing as one had to be at a big university.

After 386BSD (not to be confused with Mt Xinu BSD-386) and Linux, a lot changed. Arguably, this allowed hardware and software to be less of what one had to concern themselves with, versus what application was being run. Had it not been for gcc, neither Linux, nor 386BSD would have been possible, because of EULA and copyright restrictions.

It is scary how much times have changed. Today, one did decide to go off and write a new OS, one might find themselves on the wrong side of the law because it didn't have a hardware-enforced DRM stack, or that "terrorists" might be able to use it. The irony of it all... In the mid 1990s, I remember a lot of improvements done on the SMP part of the Linux kernel by the the Iran University of Science and Technology. This wasn't even something that one would worry about, as back then, if you were on the Net, there was some respect [1]. These days, just the mention of that would get people screaming about terrorism and backdoors.

Of course, there was encouragement, especially if one had a reasonable effort going and mentioned it on USENET groups. You did have the occasional detractor, but generally writing something, anything was encouraged. Now, with the shills and trolls out there, one almost has to write something in a vacuum, release it, and expect consequences for the action like it was a crime.

[1]: At the time the buffoons were on the warez BBS systems bragging about their new US Robotics HST modems... well, until September came rolling around each year, and the wave of college freshmen came in only to get housebroken or access yanked by the sysadmins.

Re:Today

[Darinbob]

The first public release of GNU Emacs was March 20, 1985, with the first widely distributed version available later that year (15.34).

Re:Today

[ilguido]

Before the GPL there was the GNU Emacs General Public License: http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/emacs_gpl.html .
A bit of history of the first open source license: http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html .

Re:30 years on

[KiloByte]

HURD ain't done 'til Linux won't run!

As Hurd can't run on any semi-modern machine anymore (lacking small details like SATA or USB support), you actually need Linux (/Windows/OSX/Solaris) to host a VM...

Re:30 years on

[TheloniousCoward]

These things take time. But when it *does* show up, I hope it will be something professional like Linux.

Re:And nothing of value was gained

[ebno-10db]

Back when I was using Solaris, standard procedure (and not just for me) was to install all the GNU utilities and put them in the path ahead of the Sun stuff.

Contrary to popular belief

[BitZtream]

Stallman did not invent open source, nor start 'the revolution'. It was there before him. It wasn't his idea. While he has contributed much to open source, he has also personally harmed it more than just about anyone I can think of. His religion may appear great at first glance, but it is, just like pretty much every religion, warped into his personal agenda and crusade against everyone who doesn't agree with him in entirety.

His behavior in public forums and disrespect for others around him is a good example of you should ignore him.

I suspect, the same sort of vigor will be unleashed against this comment. -5 disagree after all.

Re:Contrary to popular belief

[StormReaver]

His behavior in public forums and disrespect for others around him is a good example of [why] you should ignore him.

His consistent accuracy in predicting the consequences of disregarding Freedom is a great example of why you should listen to him.

Re:Contrary to popular belief

[Darinbob]

RMS started his free software stance because of the harm he saw that occured with Emacs and he wanted to prevent similar future harm. He didn't just come up with this out of the blue or for no reason.

The existing Unix port of Emacs from James Gosling has been shared, and Stallman and others had been modifying that to improve it to become the first GNU Emacs (such as adding a real Lisp instead of MockLisp as well as making it behave more like older Emacs). Then Gosling put a copyright on his Emacs and sold it to Unipress. Unipress then told Stallman to stop distributing his own Emacs because it now contained copyrighted code. So a marathon hacking session was done to rip out all the older code to sanitize it. And that was the impetus for the GPL.

Ie, older code for a product that had been customarily shared (no one person "invented" emacs, it was a highly collaborative and incremental product). Then one port of it was sold to a company and all the shared code that existed prior to that sale was now tainted and could not be distributed. This directly led to the core principle of the GPL that existing free code could not be made un-free. Also a very big reason why most people do not want people to release any source code that comes without a license included.

I'm not even a big fan of the GPL myself but I respect it. Maybe Stallman seems too idealistic or too paranoid to some people but the reasons for his stance are clear and reasonable.

And I'm just delighted...

[gwolf]

To see that the kind of discussion (and the depth of it, and the arguments raised, and all that yada-yada) are *so* similar to what I read for GNU's 20th anniversary. Or for the 15th anniversary. New kids learn our beloved traditions and repeat our same flames as if they were chanting ancient mantrams.

Now, get off my lawn!

Re:Let's Get Him Laid!

[Gavagai80]

I admire your brave offer to have sex with RMS, and wish you the best of luck. Suggest you bring a nose clip and blindfold. Don't think anyone will be joining you though, I'm sure not.

Writing kernels

[unixisc]

Writing a kernel ain't hard - Linus did it. Writing a microkernel ain't hard - Tannenbaum did it. The reason Hurd wasn't pulled off was that they kept changing the microkernels that they wanted to work w/ - L4, Viengoos and Coyotos - before reverting to Mach. Essentially, Hurd was one of the worst managed projects - if at all managed

In fact, since much of the work in HURD was about writing daemons that used the kernel services, they would have done well to have taken any of the available microkernels - Amoeba or Minix - and then built around those. At that time, those things were small enough that making microkernels would have been easier.

Re:30 years on

[unixisc]

That bit's been HURD to get right, but some Finnish guy cobbled up something you can use while they finish this.

FTFY

Where's my Empire, file version numbers etc.?

[magic maverick]

I want Empire!
Actually, what I really want is built in support for file version numbers (á la VMS presumably). Is that too much to ask?

I don't want to have to run some experimental file system that hasn't got support in the kernel. I want to run something mainstream, supported, and useful. But with versioning. Maybe EXT5 (if brfs doesn't do it) could have it...

Perfect timing

[Hognoxious]

Perfect timing, three months and three days before the year of linux on the desktop.

Open source vs Liberated Software

[unixisc]

I happen to agree w/ ESR, but one thing RMS can be praised for - not trying to do w/ 'Open Source' what they tried doing w/ 'Linux'. Initially, they used the retarded term 'Free Software' and later, morphed it to 'Software Freedom'. (Both misleading, since the first can imply price=$0.00 software, while the latter implies the freedom of software creators to do anything, including placing restrictions, which isn't what RMS means). 'Libre' software was better, although use of the English term 'Liberated' would have been more accurate.

But the reason ESR came up w/ the term 'Open Source' was that the 'Free Software' brand carried w/ it a perception of being militantly anti-business, much bolstered by Stallman's own activism, which was and is infra Left in both business and politics. As a result, companies were not willing to endorse such a philosophy that carried such baggage. ESR recognized that, and came up w/ this term 'Open Source' where he highlighted all the advantages that companies stood to gain by allowing their source code to be shared with business partners, customers and so on. If it weren't for ESR rebranding the philosophy as Open Source and focusing on good development methodology, things like Linux would never have found widespread adaptation across the market.

The best case for that is what's happening w/ GPL3. Although the RMS' Leftist views were always known, there were ways around it in GPL2. But in GPL3, w/ clauses like the Anti-Tivoization clause and the Patent Indemnity clauses, companies that previously were fine w/ using GPL now put a ban on it. That's why you see moves like GCC to LLVM/Clang, GNU to Busybox, and more parts of GNU being replaced by non-GNU equivalents licensed under BSD. In fact, the smarter vendors dual license their products under both BSDL and GPL3, so that users could use it under either license depending on their needs or wants.

Misrepresenting RMS is unfair.

[jbn-o]

"I've seen articles that call me "The father of open source". Now what use is it to be talked about if I'm associated with the wrong views! So I sent a letter to the editor saying, "If I'm the father of open source it was conceived through artificial insemination using stolen sperm without my knowledge or consent"." —Richard Stallman, August 5, 2013, New York City University, New York City, USA

I believe he'd be the first to point out to you that you are misattributing the movement he started (as he frequently mentions in his talks such as this one around 58m25s including being talked about with the wrong views at around 1h). RMS wrote the GPL and started the GNU Project so that users could live in freedom enjoying the freedoms to run, share, and modify computer software; the very freedoms that the open source movement was formed to never bring up so the open source proponents could pursue mere technical practicality (a term he describes well around 57m10s) and talk about "licensing terms" as you describe—free of ethical issues. The way you put it makes the two movements seem like some insigificant name difference for no particular reason, but that's completely untrue. Giving the wrong philosophical views credit happens elsewhre too and correcting this misapprehension is the basis for giving GNU a share of the credit when discussing a GNU/Linux system.

Careful speech and well-explained distinctions are among rms's hallmarks—he speaks and writes with a precision not often found these days. The GNU Project has helpfully collected a list of terms to avoid, terms people often speak or write without understanding how their own thoughts could be pure nonsense or clear misstatement. It behooves people describing him and his work to get these terms right. After all, it's only fair that one not misrepresent his views when describing him.

Perhaps you'd benefit from watching a few of his speeches so you can better understand what he says and thinks, then perhaps you won't make the errors you made in your post.