Should it be GNU/Linux [LWN.net]

Should it be GNU/Linux

Posted Mar 26, 2007 21:55 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Should it be GNU/Linux by landley
Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world

[about RMS, and his visionary qualities]
>Why is that "reactionary"?
He was striving to maintain the status quo. Return to the glorius past.

That is like saying that Mohandas Gandhi was reactionary because he just wanted to "return to the glorious past" when the English did not rule India. True, but lopsided.

Stallman wanted not to return to a naïve past where kind people shared code, but go on to a new situation where people wrote free software because they wanted it to be free, and companies (a new concept) pooled their effort. Guess what, it works.

[again about RMS, and his cathedralicious model of development]
It's in the book, though, if you look for it:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathed...

Ah, you worried me. For a moment I thought it was there, plain for all to see as a central recurrent theme and I had missed it: that instead of talking about closed, proprietary software Raymond was speaking about his old buddy Stallman all the time. But it is sort of hidden, isn't it?

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