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CoherentCoherentPosted Mar 19, 2007 17:18 UTC (Mon) by filker0 (guest, #31278)In reply to: GNU/Busybox ?!? by rqosa Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world
Thanks for pointing this out. (I used to work for Mark Williams Co. in the 80s.)
And before the GNU project, there were free tools available (compilers, linkers, interpreters, editors, simulation software, etc.) distributed by various user groups (remember, this is a time before the Internet as we know it -- AARPAnet and BITnet were around, as were corporate and academic research networks, but it was difficult to get access to those) like DECUS acted as repositories and distributors for free (as in beer and as in freedom) software.
I used to know (and work with on occasion) one of the original authors of Coherent (also the author of Decus C and MicroEmacs), and along with a few other folks (myself included) we started working on a free Unix clone that we were going to call "Pubix". It never got very far, but that was in the early 1980s. When RMS published the GNU Manifesto and started up the GNU Project, we decided to follow that, as we had other things to do.
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Coherent Posted Mar 19, 2007 20:07 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > And before the GNU project, there were free tools available (compilers,> linkers, interpreters, editors, simulation software, etc.) distributed > by various user groups
Not just for Unix variants either. Here's an article on the history of
http://web.archive.org/web/20010423051125/http://www.comp...
What Stallman had was access to MIT's internet connection. MIT was
http://landley.net/history/wwiv/FLASHUP.422
(And all the other files in that directory).
Of course Stallman claims none of it would have happened without him,
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 20, 2007 0:02 UTC (Tue) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] The first FOSS OS was GNU+Linux. BSD missed that distinction because of the ATT lawsuit (thru no fault of theirs).
Even as late as November 1993 had Sun opened up Solaris+Toolchain we would not be talking about Linux anything nor GNU anything.
>Of course Stallman claims none of it would have happened without him,
Really? He claims that? Nope. He has been clear and upfront that he came from a community that shared code. It was the instrusion of proprietary software and the loss of those communities that crystallised him to write the GNU manifesto and start FSF.
At a time when everybody was jumping ship to proprietary companies and becoming multimillonaires. True eventually we would have had all the FOSS software we have... but at a delay of atleast 3-5 years without GNU. And who can estimate the ecosystem effects the delay would have had on the Internet?
Anyway giving credit to FSF and GNU is not about RMS. It is not even about giving credit to FSF and GNU it is about spreading the philosophy of freedom and ending the slavery of copyright. Did I point you to "Misintrepreting Copyright"?
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 20, 2007 5:01 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] > The first FOSS OS was GNU+Linux.
I think a few members of the Homebrew Computer Club would disagree with you on this one. FOSS OSes existed more than a decade before Linus put his kernel source up for FTP.
You keep using the term "GNU+Linux." Has any distro ever actually called itself this? "GNU/Linux" was not used until 1994, pretty late in the game.
Frankly, anonymous1, people were tired of the GNU/Whatever PR campaign in 1996. It's been over a decade and the term just hasn't caught on. Do you suppose you'll still be making an issue of this in 2017? Just wondering. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.misc/msg/778...
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 20, 2007 22:49 UTC (Tue) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] The most important points I am making is1) First comers get recognition. (Home brew FOSS OSes might have existed, but I never got to use them so I cant give them any credit, we are not merely talking about history here. We are talking about giving credit to actors who have played an important historical role in the ecosystem.) So yeah I will continue to call the OS GNU+Linux.
(Why not GNU/Linux? because some people have reasonably objected that GNU/Linux could be intrepreted as "Linux is a GNU project" like GNU/HURD. So I choose not to use that wording. If you find a better way to give both GNU and Linux credit I will use that wording. Do you have any suggestions?)
2) The general public hardly heard about Free Software or the freedoms. Open Source dominates and people have not even heard of FSF or GNU. Like I said before "Anyway giving credit to FSF and GNU is not about RMS. It is not even about giving credit to FSF and GNU it is about spreading the philosophy of freedom and ending the slavery of copyright. Did I point you to "Misintrepreting Copyright"?
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 0:38 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] > I never got to use them so I cant give them any credit
Well, that's awfully strange. You're hell-bent on trying to win credit for the FSF and yet you are totally unwilling to credit the FOSS OSes that came before it? Care to explain yourself?
If you're not careful, the general public will come to know the FSF as "those weirdos who are still carrying on about calling it GNU@Linux." There comes a point when loud advocacy starts doing more harm than good. Just an observation.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 5:13 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] I use GNU+Linux, there I gave GNU credit. I did not use other FOSS OSes and cant give them credit. I cant say "I use XYZ FOSS OS" because I dont use XYZ FOSS OS which might have come first.
When my friends ask me what OS are you using. I dont tell them the whole list of FOSS OSes from start to finish. I tell them its "GNU+Linux" because I want to give credit to Linux kernel hackers and GNU.
Interesting that you concentrate on the minor point of giving credit to GNU. I thought I made myself very clear. I am giving credit to Free Software philosophy and my goal is to end the slavery of copyright. I dont care that much about giving GNU or FSF credit. Giving credit is merely a means to an end of freedom.
I notice that the nobody else strives to explain the importance of freedom with respect to knowledge, FSF does that hence I point to people to them.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 8:31 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] "GNU+Linux" gives credit to two concepts: GNU and Linux. That's it. If you intend to give credit to the Free Software philosophy or end the "slavery of copyright", a trite 9-character slogan won't help you at all.
I worry that by dwelling on petty issues like this, the FSF is actually marginalizing themselves rather than promoting themselves. I know that I'm personally less of a fan now than I was back in 2000 (I contributed code but not in this decade). The GPLv3 is overreaching IMO, and the FSF is spending valuable time on petty issues like "GNU:Linux" and badvista.org rather than, say, releasing Emacs. The FSF used to lead by example, now they're mostly shouting instructions from the rear. It's depressing to watch.
Nobody else strives to explain freedom with respect to knowledge? (notwithstanding the GPLv3 process I suppose...) How about the EFF? Or OpenBSD? Or Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, or any other distro? The Apache Project? The Eclipse Foundation? I could go on...
Anyhow, it's apparent that neither of us are achieving any traction here and I feel I've said my peace. Thank you for the discussion, whoever you are.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 11:42 UTC (Wed) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] The GPLv3 is overreaching IMO, and the FSF is spending valuable time on petty issues like "GNU:Linux" and badvista.org rather than, say, releasing Emacs. The FSF used to lead by example, now they're mostly shouting instructions from the rear.Good observation. Most of the people doing the actual work, including those people who truly deserve the credit for Linux's success, just do not have any dealings with the FSF beyond using the GPL2 and maybe tracking what's happening regarding GPL3. The only reason why the FSF has any importance today is because they're now trying to reshape everything using the GPL3. Without that sideshow, they'd be yesterday's hero.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 2:01 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Good luck doing development without RMS's compiler.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 10:43 UTC (Thu) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] I was using free C compilers before I'd ever *heard* of GCC and the FSF.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:26 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] There was no free C compiler before GCC. What compiler were you using?
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:44 UTC (Thu) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] There was no free C compiler before GCC. What compiler were you using?I didn't say it was before GCC, I said before I'd ever heard of GCC. I don't remember the name - it was something I bought from a PD (Public Domain) library on floppy 15 to 20 years ago. It was a DOS program, supported the full C spec at the time (or as much of it as I used, apart from fork() obviously), and allowed me to write graphical programs for MSDOS5. It was at least free as in beer, although I don't remember if the source was included or not. I stopped using it in 1992 when I started programming HPUX workstations. The point is that if that FSF hadn't existed, if RMS didn't write GCC, someone else's C compiler would have taken its place as the compiler of choice simply because other people were writing those sorts of thing at the time anyway. The Public Domain scene was *massive* for a time during the 80's and early 90's before Internet access became more widespread.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:23 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > The point is that if that FSF hadn't existed, if RMS didn't write GCC,> someone else's C compiler would have taken its place as the compiler of > choice simply because other people were writing those sorts of thing at > the time anyway. The Public Domain scene was *massive* for a time > during the 80's and early 90's before Internet access became more > widespread.
Seconded.
Anybody remember Jim Butterfield? My commodore 64 came bundled with a
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/jim_butterfield_co...
Rob
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 13:01 UTC (Fri) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] There was no free C compiler before GCC. What compiler were you using?This quote makes my point. There were free C compilers before GCC. I even mentioned one of them in my comment. In my senior year in college, I got a 9-track tape from the Decus library that contained 2 free C compilers, 7 or 8 Pascal compilers, 3 Lisp interpreters, a BCPL compiler, a BCP compiler, a number of Basic interpreters, and lots of other "Public Domain" compilers. This was in 1980. Several years before GNU, the GNU Manifesto, or GCC. It was because of what RMS saw as a betrayal of the trust that the PD software developers put in the community when releasing their code that he came up with the GNU Manifesto in the first place. RMS decided that the rules governing the Public Domain were too loose, allowing proprietary changes to once PD projects to be all proprietary, allowing credit to be stripped from a product and a company to claim complete ownership of the source even if all they did was add a command here or just their logo to the runtime start-up banner. The GPL was created to replace the Public Domain with a license that did not give up control of the code but expressed a perpetual free-use in the spirit of the software sharing community that RMS "grew up" in. You can thank Unipress for this, I think. If I recall correctly, they're the ones that pushed RMS over that cliff.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:18 UTC (Fri) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] Agreed. However:You can thank Unipress for this, I think. If I recall correctly, they're the ones that pushed RMS over that cliff. Whilst it was RMS who came up with the GPL itself, it's another case of there would have been someone else to step into the breach had he not done so. There were lots of rumblings during the late-80's (GPL1 was written in 1989) over these same issues, especially credit-stripping. Some people by that time were already putting their own usage and distribution restrictions in their README and/or documentation files. RMS was probably the first one to came up with a popular set of restrictions, but my licence history isn't so good here. But if RMS had decided to go into gardening instead, we'd still be pretty much where we are today, just with different players but similar licences and projects.
Free software, FOSS, RMS, and too much discursion Posted Mar 23, 2007 15:38 UTC (Fri) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] I never meant to imply that RMS was unique in that regard. There were a number of us in thefree software community at the time who were just as upset about trends as he was. Our motivations overlapped, but were not always the same. My mention of Unipress is because of the Emacs debicle; that was Stallman's motive for becoming the advocate that he became. There were people who worked at DEC who were at least RMS's equal when it came to software freedom, but they had other motives as well (such as insuring the ability to run something they liked on hardware that the authors didn't support, or no longer supported.)
About that same time, AT&T decided to try to make a commercial go at Unix, and the licensing
My motivation for getting into the free software community was a mix of expansion of
I knew RMS at the time all this was happening, as he and I shared some friends. I doubt that he
My heros in the Free Software arena include the afore mentioned David Conroy (now at
RMS may still be involved in the development of software, but he has made himself into a full-
I am not anti-RMS, but I'm not pro, either. I do believe that the GNU project has done a lot of
So getting back to the original point -- RMS was pushed over the edge to become the advocate
I will not belittle what RMS has done, but I don't believe that he's the pioneer that some paint him
Free software, FOSS, RMS, and too much discursion Posted Feb 9, 2011 7:42 UTC (Wed) by rs79 (guest, #72801) [Link]
Agreed Dave Conroy is the real hero here. In 1975 I worked for Teklogix in Canada where Dave had worked and was still doing some consulting. He'd just finished University of Waterloo and wrote a C compiler for RSX11M.
Vik Sondi and I were the first two people I know of to use it, presumably others at Waterlook did, although I went there the next year and met most of the Unix poeple and never saw Dave's compiler used there - we didn't need to we had real Bell Labs Unix on a PDP 11/45 and it *had* a C compiler already - they had no need of RSX there. And we sure coldn't use Unix for real work. And RT-11 Sucked. Badly.
Dave gave the compiler to DECUS, the DEC users group. It popped up on my radar in Los Angeles in 1984 when we used it to generate Z8000 code. I noticed Dave's name was still in it. By 1992 or so I'd noticed the free C compiler I got from John "hoptoad" Gilmore's site said it was a port of the DECUS C compiler - and was now called "gcc".
I dunno what RMS wrote, but from what I've seen Dave Conroy wrote what is now called gcc.
As an aside, I met Charles Forsyth briefly at Waterloo. He looked a bit like a grown up Harry Potter and always wore a blue blazer. Dave looked like a deadhead, they were quite the pair.
There's a picture of me and Dave at the 1975 Teklogix company picnic in Terra Cotta, Ontario here: http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2011/Feb/9/.rjsdgcs.j... I'm in the bicycle getup, I'd ridden 50 miles to get there, Dave is in the blue shirt and long hair.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 17:30 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > Good luck doing development without RMS's compiler.
Fabrice Bellard's Tiny C Compiler (http://tinyc.org) is somewhat stalled
So yeah, I've got that covered. It's still just on my todo list because
I've used Turbo/Borland C, I've used Watcom's x86->PPC cross compiler,
Rob
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:04 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] GNU doesn't claim ownership of programs built with GCC, either.
Of course GCC will never go GPLv3 only: that would have catastrophic consequences, as no non-GPLv3ed software would be buildable with such a GCC (which is obviously deleterious). The runtime libraries will remain under various flavours of GPL+exception (the precise nature of the exception varying depending on the nature of the language so as to ensure that programs compiled with GCC are not encumbered: the GNAT runtime, with its cross-unit inlining, needs different exceptions from libstdc++ needs, which needs different exceptions to libgcc or libjava...)
The *compiler* will probably go GPLv3 (except for the docs *sigh*), but GCC is more than just a compiler.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:28 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] GCC will go GPLv3 only, but all the support libraries GCC relies on have a "special exception" clause that essentially lets you build proprietary code with gcc.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:09 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] If gcc actually requires this exception than any gplv3 word processorwill require a similar exception to avoid the word processing documents you save out from being considered derived works of the word processor, and that's deeply silly.
They came up with lgpl for glibc because significant chunks of the
Having the exception to make you feel better is one thing, but compiling
Rob
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Word processors don't textually copy parts of the word processor intodocuments you save with it.
GCC *does* textually copy parts of itself (libgcc, libstdc++ headers,
Microsoft *do* claim rights over programs you build with their C compiler,
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 14:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I was trying to emphasise that the *exceptions* would remain, andGPL+exception != GPL.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 21:40 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] > a trite 9-character slogan won't help you at all
I hope it does. " This didn't mean they would all agree with us, but at least they would pay attention to the arguments. They would give it serious consideration." http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#...
>Nobody else strives to explain freedom with respect to knowledge?
Yes. Nobody. e.g. Linus says "Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter."
What in effect he is saying is that copyright is not a problem. For me it is a serious problem and somebody needs to talk about it. Have you read Misintrepreting Copyright?
> FSF used to lead by example, now they're mostly shouting
Well they make 3/4 millon dollars a year. They can take leadership in developing sw. Even assuming the best leadership their contributions will be a drop in the FOSS ocean. (they have high priority projects http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html but that is still a drop)
Why was FSF important in 1980s? Becuase the community was relatively very small any technical contributions that they gave were significant. Being in a central place (the MIT) they could act as a clearing house, absorb and send out techinal impovements etc. With the advent of net anybody can do that, and there is no reason why the FOSS community needs them to act in that role.
FSFs importance was never merely technical, it has always been about the spread of the idea of freedom. They had an effect on the licensing terms of BSD, and other important projects. (everybody knows gplv2 is cool).
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html
The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license."
The modified BSD license as we know today is also in part due to RMS.
"The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing "University of California" with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause."
RMS wrote a beautiful essay on Free Encylopedia in late 2000 if not earlier. You can see that he might as well have been talking about wikipedia (except that the essay preceded wikipedia).
To sum up. When it was important to develop code, fsf did that. Now it is more important to talk about freedom and they are doing that.
RMS has been clear about this. To paraphrase him "people are spreading gnu+linux but not talking about freedoms. if we dont tell them why gnu+linux is important, if we dont talk about freedoms they will lose the freedoms. i am going to spread the word becuase there are a lot of people spreading the SW"
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 22:17 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > >Nobody else strives to explain freedom with respect to knowledge?> > Yes. Nobody. e.g. Linus says "Me, I just don't care about proprietary > software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter."
Linus doesn't, therefore nobody does, because nobody except Linus
Note the question marks.
Now claiming that the FSF was vital to helping Steve Jackson fight to get
> The modified BSD license as we know today is also in part due to RMS.
Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to interview
For a perspective on why open source is good that has nothing whatsoever
http://landley.net/writing/stuff/commodity.html
I'm sure he'll find a way to take credit for Adam Smith's invisible hand
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 2:26 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] That's why I like capitalism. (True capitalism. Not 'haha I am a big capitolist and I make lots of people lots of money; now pass laws to protect my market') It's goes very well with Freedom.
It's the economics that goes with the politics.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 0:42 UTC (Fri) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] > Linus doesn't, therefore nobody does,
"Linux community has done (and yes, I'll take at least some of the credit for that personally) has been to try to view it as just a license, i.e. strip the politics away from it." -Linus
It is not that nobody else does it. But just that I find that he is a good summary/reflection of OSS opinion.
> Before the FSF there was no such thing as freedom,
You are exaggerating here. I said that they talk about freedom of knowledge. Which is one aspect of the various freedoms of being a human.
> organizations like the ACLU are more recent developments?
I did not find that freedom of knowledge to be the defining role of ACLU, sure they have done good work with civil rights. But with freedom of knowledge?
Debian, EFF are much more recent organisations and dont do as much advocacy as FSF does.
>Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to interview
Can you provide a link to his saying that? I know he claims to have influenced the BSD *License*, but I have not seen him take credit for the projects code. Link please.
>I'm sure he'll find a way to take credit for Adam Smith
> For a perspective on why open source is good
I have given enough thought to know that "open source" is good, your arguments are not new to me.
Knowledge is not property. Deal with it.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 17:03 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > But with freedom of knowledge?
http://lwn.net/Articles/177602/
And a couple hundred years earlier, how about Benjamin Franklin founding
> > Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to
Ok, you see above where I said "I drove up to Boston to interview him in
He didn't claim credit for the code, he said that he spoke to someone (on
I've been doing my computer history research for a longish time. :)
During this interview I specificaly asked him what the FSF was doing
> Please stop this. RMS is controversial enough without you making things
I may be just a touch biased after my friends Kandy Danner and Stu Green
However, my point was that Stallman taking credit for Minix-inspired
> But Freedom of knowledge and Public Domain are even better than
Back in the last 90's my roommate was a graduate student getting a
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
And I've been following the Electronic Frontier Foundation since the
None of that has anything to do with the FSF.
> For a lot of people the slavery of copyright is OK.
Just a little over the top, don't you think?
> But for me it is not. d I wish not to be a slave to the "Intellectual
There are five major kinds of IP law: copyrights, patents, trademarks,
If I have it and you don't and I'm never going to tell you what it is,
Patents are designed to expire, and they make you document the thing.
Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality is that
Which of us has problem dealing with reality? Saying "it shouldn't be
Rob
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 28, 2007 4:05 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] >how about Benjamin Franklin founding the first public library in the country?
Your references are interesting. ACLU, EFF, Ben Franklin. "the country" by which i presume you mean USA.
I guess only 5% of the worlds population matters. The rest? ohh they can be slaves to copyright. Right? I have to reject that NorthAmerican centrisim.
Of all the orgs that you mentioned I have great respect for Micheal Hart of Project Gutenberg. He is an advocate of the Public Domain. and i dont think he likes more than 14 (maybe 28) year copyrights.
> And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
and allow other people to make put code back under the slavery of copyright. Nope. GPL defends Freedom, and I am not going to use anything inferior. Of course you understand this well
"[GPL] preamble explaining how it uses copyright law against itself, to effectively keep software in the public domain, and prevent it from being taken OUT of the public domain" -Rob Landley
> Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality
yeah... europe dominated the world for a 500 hundred years and copyright is ubiquitous since the colonial powers signed berne(?) in late 1800s. i see no reason to assume that law defines morality.
> only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain
Good strawman. Read "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
most of what we produce is for local consumption, in our local societies. if you reveal a secret in your local community, they why should people who are shores away pay you a royalty. because you are royalty and can impose your will on them? you mean colonial subjects. Now i get it.
I notice that you did not bother to reply to my assertion the OSS people dont care "if under current laws 99% of the worlds non-western people are criminals under copyright law." I presume you read "Misinterpreting Copyright"
non-western goverments (in the 60's and 70's)tried and failed to get better copyright treaties
C.F. Johnson,'The Origins of the Stockholm Protocol',
Access to Knowledge is another recent effort to deal with the salvery of copyright and other forms of "IP" .
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 23:07 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] You'll notice that I never claimed that Linus strives to explain freedom. That's clearly untrue. Good strawman argument though!
RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix? So why doesn't he ask Wikimedia to call it "GNU+Wikipedia"? This would get a LOT more people to pay serious attention to the arguments than "GNU+Linux", wouldn't it? Probably a few orders of magnitude more.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:46 UTC (Thu) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix?In 2000? He was hardly the first man to come up with the concept of an electronic online encyclopedia written by a vast array of far-flung writers updated (semi | in | )frequently. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide, anyone? That was 1978. Sorry, that's the GNU/Hitchhiker's Guide. RMS had the same idea, therefore the idea is his.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 1:30 UTC (Fri) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] >You'll notice that I never claimed that Linus strives
You claimed that RedHat is a counterexample, but are they. They have no problem with copyright. In fact claming that they have "intellectual property". Really? Since when are government granted monopolies property?
Property Rights and Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K.Levine
"All of this brings us to what intellectual property law is really about - a reality that is simply obscured by analogies to other types of property. Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea - this is a right that we have just pointed out, does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea."
"The closest case is that of slavery. That is, the courts will not enforce a contract in which you sell yourself into slavery. In the case of slavery, as in the case of intellectual "property" we believe that the economic and moral arguments point in the same direction for the same reason. Your labor is irrevocably bound to your person. To enforce a contract in which you sell yourself to someone else requires them to enforce the contract by intrusive, expensive, and morally offensive measures. Hence we allow you to rent your labor, but not sell yourself."
> RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix?
It is not merely about prediction. It is about setting out to work and trying to do it. "A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia."
Not just that, trying to come up with the principles of how it should be licensed etc... is important. I gave a link to the essay because he explains the principles clearly and I found them useful.
"The last and most important rule for pages in the encyclopedia is the exclusionary rule:
If a page on the web covers subject matter that ought to be in the encyclopedia or the course library, but its license is too restricted to qualify, we must not make links to it from encyclopedia articles or from courses. "
This is not about praising RMS. It is just that he is thoughtful and what he says has a lot of utility. We must consider his arguments both on rational and moral grounds. Whether we agree or not is a different matter.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 10:30 UTC (Fri) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link] Wikipedia wasn't the first.
http://www.galactic-guide.com/faq/faq.shtml#what-is-pgg
The Galactic Guide started in 1991.
Can I mirror Galactic Guide? Posted Mar 28, 2007 3:23 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link] Do I the freedoms of free culture w.r.t. Galactic Guide?
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 21, 2007 17:27 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > The general public hardly heard about Free Software or the freedoms.
Back in the 1970's there _was_ no proprietary software market to speak
In order to sell shrink-wrapped binary software, you need lots of the
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/
In its first two years, the Apple II sold a combined total of 43,000
The first "killer app" was Visicalc for the Apple II, written in 1979.
The proprietary software industry emerged around 1980 because there were
In this context, the founding of the Free Software Foundation in 1983 was
I repeat that the GPLv2 was great. It took several iterations to get it
Linux is NOT a reincarnation of the GNU project. When the GNU project
Posted Mar 22, 2007 2:47 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] Micro-soft was one of the first, and they were a shoestring operation with three employees, one of which was part time and one of which had a day job at HP. A Microsoft employee had a day job at HP? Which one? Are you sure you're not thinking of Apple computer and Woz? Draping a GNU flag over Linux is SILLY That's a matter of perspective. Personally, the software packages I rely on most are Bash, Emacs, GCC and GDB. Notice the pattern? I run these atop a Linux kernel at the moment, but draping a Linux flag over all that would be silly since I've also used FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and even Microsoft Windows at times. The GNU project may not have become whatever you wish it had and there are certainly plenty of other important projects in the free software community, but it has not failed. GNU remains relevant to quite a few people. Deal with it.
Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:00 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > A Microsoft employee had a day job at HP? Which one? Are you sure> you're not thinking of Apple computer and Woz?
Ah, you're right. Paul Allen's day job for Microsoft's first year was at
> I've also used FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris and even Microsoft Windows at
I don't. I also use vi instead of Emacs, and I point out that Ubuntu has
> The GNU project may not have become whatever you wish it had and there
Unix won. MacOS X's Unix underpinnings are BSD, Linux was directly
The GNU project was one of a half-dozen independent rewrites of the basic
> GNU remains relevant to quite a few people.
I am not one of them.
The biggest boost GCC ever got was Sun's Ed Zander deciding to unbundle
Before that gcc was virtually unheard of, after that it became the
Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:07 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] You use vi over Emacs because of the *license*?!
Sheesh. Even RMS isn't remotely this rigid.
(Oh, and GCC was widely used and widely known in the embedded market long before Sun's unfortunate C compiler unbundling. Surely you know this, what with busybox's embedded penetration...)
Posted Mar 22, 2007 21:00 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > You use vi over Emacs because of the *license*?!
No, I use vi over Emacs because learning Lisp never struck me as a
> Oh, and GCC was widely used and widely known in the embedded market
First I've heard of it. What would that have to do with BusyBox? (Let's
Seems somewhat unlikely, since up through the 1990's the most common
Maybe you're referring to 68k, ala http://www.obviously.com/dice/ ?
According to
I know 1990 is about when I first heard of it. Then again, I was looking
Rob
Using Emacs requires learning Lisp? Posted Mar 23, 2007 18:27 UTC (Fri) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] No, I use vi over Emacs because learning Lisp never struck me as a reasonable requirement for a text editor to impose on its' users. How does editing text with Emacs require learning Lisp? I'll admit that I do know Lisp but I don't often apply that to Emacs. Even when I do I'm experimenting or adding some custom feature, which is not normal use. I appreciate the light footprint and ubiquity of vi and I have no trouble accepting that many people like it better than Emacs, but I hope you have some reasons less silly than this one.
Using Emacs requires learning Lisp? Posted Mar 26, 2007 12:53 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Doing anything much with Emacs customization used to require learning Lisp, but this hasn't been true for perhaps a decade. One of the problems with long-lived projects is that they acquire reputations which they then drag around long after they are no longer accurate.
(In any case, it's not as if elisp is very hard to learn, at least not to the depth required to customize Emacs. I learnt that much of it in two hours when I was twelve from the emacs-lisp-intro...)
Sic transit GNU Posted Mar 23, 2007 18:04 UTC (Fri) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] I also use vi instead of Emacs, and I point out that Ubuntu has replaced bash with dash as its' default #!/bin/sh in Edgy and Feisty (although I actually object to this because dash is broken). So? As far as I can tell your position is not merely that it's *possible* to get by without this or that GNU component (that's clearly true) but that GNU failed and is irrelevant. Since a substantial number of people depend on Emacs, Bash and other GNU components on a day to day basis that can't be true. Noting that there are other people who don't seems to be just another way to say, "there are certainly plenty of other important projects in the free software community" which I said above. Unix won. Yes, obviously. But that's beside the point. The GNU project didn't set out rewrite Unix for technical reasons. Their goal was to ensure that a complete, free software operating system would be available. Distributions such as Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu and others may not be all things to all people (and yes, I know "Saint Ignutius" himself is unwilling to bless them) but GNU components remain a vital part of each and the free software philosophy articulated and promoted by RMS played a substantial role in making them what they are. Spinning history to obscure this is not productive. You don't have to personally like RMS, to call the Linux based operating system on your computer GNU, to use the forthcoming GPLv3 as a license for your own work or otherwise accept any suggestion from the Free Software Foundation to appreciate the contributions they have made and continue to make to this community.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 23, 2007 15:22 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] To be totally accurate, libc5 for Linux was a early version of GNU libc, hacked up so it wasn't recognizable anymore (because the starting point was very sorely lacking abandonware; Linux needing a decent libc made GNU libc development (re)start in earnest).
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 12:24 UTC (Thu) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link] Debian uses the term GNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd, and GNU/kFreeBSD).
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:36 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] > Debian uses the term GNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd, and GNU/kFreeBSD).
And there's a reason they do so and that nobody else of any size does.
From Chapter 10 of Richard Stallman's biography, "Free as in Freedom",
> Shortly after the Manifesto's release, the Free Software Foundation
So Bruce Perens took credit for that decision.
Rob
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:18 UTC (Thu) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link] Given the state of the Debian lists and the political views of many people associated with it's as much "It's easier to call it GNU/Linux than to deal with people banging on about how we should do that" as anything else.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:15 UTC (Thu) by anton (guest, #25547) [Link] >"GNU/Linux" was not used until 1994, pretty late in the game.
I installed Yggdrasil LGX (Linux/GNU/X) in 1993.
First FOSS OS? Posted Mar 29, 2007 18:44 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] So did I, but not until early '95.
Personally, I think "Linux/GNU/X" is a great name.
Coherent Posted Mar 21, 2007 10:46 UTC (Wed) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > we started working on a free Unix clone that we were going to call "Pubix". It never got very far
Otherwise one assumes you'd have changed the name after the first couple of roomfuls of people broke out in giggling fits...
Coherent Posted Mar 22, 2007 10:43 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] If we thought we were seeing some (petty) people complain about the correct pronunciation of `Linux'... it could have been so much worse. :)
Pubix Posted Mar 23, 2007 13:34 UTC (Fri) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] Actually, it was a deliberate pun. Something to do with a castrated Multics being a Unix, and Pubixbeing intact...
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