ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Jul 2, 2005 0:04 UTC (Sat) by donbarry (guest, #10485)
Parent article: ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

The entire framing of the "contest" by ESR is false. The Linux part of
GNU/Linux was merely the first practically useable kernel -- and would have been pointless had not a decade of work, essentially all of it under the GPL license, been made possible by the FSF and Stallman -- and -- the valuation of freedom as a significant virtue, and its codification in the terms of the GPL.

What was a virtue in the 50's and 60's (share and share alike on computers) was one because the prevailing values were set by academics. As corporations began to dominate the supply of not only hardware but software, they attempted and to some extent succeeded in displacing academic ethics. Stallman's great and signal victory was to reinject academic ethics, indeed, essentially the Golden Rule, back into software production as an intrinsic value, not an afterthought.

ESR's public career, starting much later, was essentially as a parasite to this movement, alternately being a critic or cheerleader in whichever capacity would get him the most press, but at all times rejecting any virtue in freedom as a value. If he developed his ideology in any consistent manner, he'd find himself some sort of third-rate Kropotkin.
The ideological confusion he has sown together with his tendency to
self-aggrandize in his rewritings of history which sometimes border on the delusional have certainly made a place for him as a figure in the history of these times, though not perhaps as the historical figure he'd like to be known as.

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ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Jul 2, 2005 1:06 UTC (Sat) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

Point taken -- I should have said most. After all, rms said in the mid
80's that the GNU system would have the X windowing system as its graphical
user interface and the TeX package as its typesetter.

However, the license(s!) of X have proven problematic on several occasions -- I'm
not just talking about recently. TeX has been mostly benign primarily
because its great virtue has been that it is eternal and unchanging --
this also of course introduces other issues!

Both were projects whose current form were reached during the 80's
(Yes, I know Tex78) and at least the discussion of "openness" informed
their respective licenses, even if the current nomenclature did not exist.
However, this dialogue in large part would not have even begun had it not
been for the very public Richard Stallman and the value and fecundity of
his project. I value both projects, though I would have preferred that
their chosen licensing went beyond the "practical" to the ideologically sound. We'd have occasionally benefitted by that. During the 1980's,
when any programmer would find himself constantly ftping to prep.ai.mit.edu
to make any new system livable, the manual installation process and slow
compiles always gave time for a little useful ideological reading.
Those lessons would be well relearned by the new and wannabe ESRs of the
modern day.

The importance of GNU

Posted Jul 6, 2005 19:06 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

Those components and many others -- including the Linux kernel -- were and continue to be quite important to the free software movement. Those who contributed them deserve our thanks. Nevertheless each was designed to be a component and not a complete free operatings system. GNU is different. Do you blame Stallman and the Free Software Foundation for refusing to re-invent the wheel? Their focus was on creating the elements of the system that were not available in other places. Replacing free software that lacked license "purity" would have been pointless.

GNU is the connective tissue that brings the collection of free software components together in a compatible way. That's why it is more important that any particular project. That's why the operating system on my computer is most correctly called GNU, even though I tend to refer to it as GNU/Linux for practical reasons.

ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Jul 2, 2005 6:50 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (guest, #24136) [Link]

> The Linux part of GNU/Linux was merely the first practically useable kernel

"Merely"? That's an awfully big "merely".

> and would have been pointless had not a decade of work, essentially all of it under the GPL license, been made possible by the FSF and Stallman

Well, GNU is not the only free implementation of the standard Unix userland stuff; BSD has its own implementations of much of it, and more recently there's also BusyBox and uClibc. The only irreplaceable GNU software is GCC, binutils, and GDB.

ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Jul 6, 2005 19:38 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

The only irreplaceable GNU software is GCC, binutils, and GDB.

"Only"? That's an awfully big "only".

Even so, you've missed the point. At the time Stallman began all of the examples you cited as free implementations of standard Unix userland stuff either didn't exist or did so under a legal cloud. BusyBox and uClibc are particularly bad examples because they were created to deal with technical challenges in embedded systems, not to displace effective components like Bash and glibc everywhere. When the Free Software Foundation created the those packages they were necessary because no other free software alternative was available.

We have a complete free operating system today because Stallman and the Free Software Foundation set out to create one decades ago. That there are now many alternatives does not diminish that achievement -- indeed it makes the community as a whole richer.