Sic transit GNU
Posted Mar 23, 2007 18:04 UTC (Fri) by
GreyWizard (guest, #1026)
In reply to:
by landley
Parent article:
The road to freedom in the embedded world
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.
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