IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Peter da Silva peter at baileynm.com
Tue Sep 29 08:55:09 EST 1998


In article <6uot94$680$1 at news00.btx.dtag.de>,
Matthias Warkus <mawa at iname.com> wrote:
>Peter da Silva schrieb:
>> 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.

I don't like the term "free software", because there's a lot of "free
software" in the PC world that doesn't come with source. No charge,
unlimited redistribution, just no access to the code. If you go around
using the term "free software" today you'll confuse people.

>> 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.

I believe the Berkeley license predates it.

>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.

I wouldn't claim that it's not free, I just prefer not to use it.

Both licenses have been used to crowbar open reluctant source trees.

Neither license can prevent people from hoarding code, if they really
want to. I've got that copy of the GNU's bulletin with Stallman's
diatribe against commercial Linux distributions.

It's a useful tool, but without people on the inside willing to push it's
not any kind of golden key.

>> 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?

You're welcome to toss up counterexamples. I'll do my best to shoot them down.

Remember, I've been using UNIX since the 6th edition. Tools that have been
tossed into the pool since then won't be considered central. The only
tough one I can think of that I'd really miss is groff.

-- 
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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