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Debian Founder: How I Came To Find Linux
An anonymous reader writes: Ian Murdock has pretty solid open source cred: in 1993 he founded Debian, he was the CTO of Progeny and the Linux Foundation, and he helped pave the way for OpenSolaris. He has published a post about how he initially joined the Linux ecosystem. Quoting: "[In 1992], I spent most evenings in the basement of the MATH building basking in the green phosphorescent glow of the Z-29 terminals, exploring every nook and cranny of the UNIX system upstairs. ... I was also accessing UNIX from home via my Intel 80286-based PC and a 2400-baud modem, which saved me the trek across campus to the computer lab on particularly cold days. Being able to get to the Sequent from home was great, but I wanted to replicate the experience of the ENAD building's X terminals, so one day, in January 1993, I set out to find an X server that would run on my PC. As I searched for such a thing on Usenet, I stumbled across something called 'Linux.'"
How did you come to find Linux?
truly free (that is, non-GPL) licenses.
Let me help you understand Stallman's mind:
Under the BSD license, you can take free code and use it as part of a proprietary operating system.
Under the GNU license, derivative code must also be distributed under the GNU license.
So it is not about your freedom. It's about the code's freedom.
Stallman's view is that proprietary software is an evil by itself; it represents a refusal to cooperate with your fellow men. His work, his cause, is to make sure that good code is always freely available to all, and anything else is a treason against mankind. If that sounds too extreme, just read the first chapter of Free As In Freedom. Even if you disagree, there is no way not to feel sympathy for his stance.