IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Peter da Silva peter at baileynm.com
Mon Sep 28 10:58:06 EST 1998


In article <6uo7a1$i3m$3 at news01.btx.dtag.de>,
Matthias Warkus <mawa at iname.com> wrote:
>I don't think so. Whatever fuss ESR is making, RMS still is important as the
>mastermind of GNU. And whatever the Open Sourcers ramble about GNU purism and
>stuff, without the GNU project, Open Source would be nothing.

*boggle*

The GNU people are *part* of the open source community, no matter what they
might think and however they might ramble on about everyone else's lack of
vision and the lack of G in Linux. There seems to be a significant disconnect
somewhere if *anyone* can claim there's no interrelationship between the FSF
and the rest of the open source community (small o, small s, I'm not one of
Eric's minions but I'm quite happy to co-opt his terminology) with a straight
face.

Yes, GCC is cool. Yes, the GNU people to put a lot of good code into the
community. They're noyt the whole community, though, and it's damned arrogant
to assume that they're even the keystone. They certainly aren't now, if
they ever were.

I do believe that the BSD folks would have managed without the GNU people.
There's multiple non-GPL open source C compilers... they had one of their
own, and if GCC hadn't been there they'd have run with it, and probably
have converted to TenDRA by now, and that's the only really central tool
that isn't easily reproducible by a talented undergrad in his spare time.

-- 
In hoc signo hack, Peter da Silva <peter at baileynm.com>
 `-_-'   "Milloin halasit viimeksi suttasi?"
  'U`
         "Tell init(8) to lock-n-load, we're goin' zombie slaying!"



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