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.

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.