IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Matthias Warkus mawarkus at t-online.de
Mon Sep 28 15:58:12 EST 1998


Peter da Silva schrieb:
> 
> 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,
Of course, never confuse Open Source and open source.
Anyway, I don't like the term "open source". Free software is what I like.

> 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.
Yupp.

> 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.
Hmm... to me, the creation of the General Public License certainly was a
keystone. Unless you claim, like some of the more radical Berkeley-License-ers
do, that free software is not free as long as you cannot rip code off for
commercial use.

GNU was a keystone since IIRC they were the first to not only release code under
a license that keeps it free, but managed to get enough momentum into it, too.
Companies pool for maintaining a GPL compiler...
In the days before GPL, they would have ripped the heart out of it and released
a commercial version.

> 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.
Hmmm... sure?

mawa
-- 
mailto:mawa at iname.com | ACME Frob Coil Oil ... makes bits go faster!
My site was cracked by some obscene idiots this summer. It will go up
on another server soon. 'mawaspace' on Angelfire is not mine anymore.
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