Papering over a binary blob [LWN.net]

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 4, 2011 14:04 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Papering over a binary blob by njs
Parent article: Papering over a binary blob

The "no no-free software allowed anywhere" stand they are now taking was completely impossible when "the GNU system" was gcc, emacs and a spattering of nice-to-have packages which could only run under a Unix.

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Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 4, 2011 23:01 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Have you, um, read the GNU manifesto? Their goal in writing that software was always to produce a complete free replacement for Unix, and producing a spattering of nice-to-have packages was a nice side-effect along the way. AFAIK RMS has always argued that using non-free software is ethically acceptable if and only if you are using it to produce a free replacement.

That's their ideal, though; I wouldn't call it their stance. If they actually had a "no non-free software allowed anywhere" stance, then surely they'd be trying to squash tools like mingw, and the GPL wouldn't continue to have a special exception for linking against anything "normally distributed with the operating system"?