Tweet
A few points.
1. for those who like public domain:
Check out CC0 by creative commons
2. Regardless of what RMS has done in previous years, he is woefully out of touch with the needs of both tech activism, and needs most users have with modern computing devices. he still spends most of the time on the command line, sans X, only starting X for things like web browsers and such.
3. The FSF has been lost, and close to rudderless for decades, and most of the slack has been picked up elsewhere. The campaign against unfree javascript while crucial technologies like Replicant languish and are backburnered. It might be true while a lot of these people where inspired by previous actions of the FSF in previous DECADES, they have hardly been on the front lines of tech for a very very long time.
There is a lot of trolling, copypasta, and shitposting, of which is to be expected in a high profile drama thread. I am going to post this for the uniniated reading this who may want a straight answer.
1. UNIX came first. Lets be really honest about what UNIX was, and why it grew. UNIX was developed at AT&T bell labs. It was NOT originally a commercial project because AT&T was not allowed to sell computer stuff being a state sanctioned monopoly. It was made because it was useful internally. AT&T shared the source code because it couldn't sell it. Often, because everyone had the source code, people would fix bugs and sent back fixes to AT&T, and each other. One such big user of UNIX was Berkeley University, a public university that developed fixes and tools that ran on UNIX and distributed those for Free. Much of this software got included in later AT&T versions of UNIX. This software package was known as the Berkley Software Distribution. You likely know it by the acronym BSD.
2. There was a culture of sharing software that revolved around UNIX. Humans don't live in a vacuum. There is a relation between culture and tech. Long have cultures formed around users of similar machines. So even if this was made largely by a company. It was distributed with source code, and there where a community of programmers that enjoyed sharing code that came from the environment.
3. UNIX was made close source in the 80s, and AT&T was allowed to license and sell UNIX so it did. Many companies at this stage sold computers with UNIX derived operating systems. BSD itself was still free, but need an operating system to run on, of which was no longer free.
4. There were a lot of people at this time that enjoyed and wanted to continue the community that revolved around UNIX now that AT&T was no longer offering UNIX for free. Many of these people are programmers, just as good as AT&T, and have provided code that was later included in UNIX which AT&T profited off, of which they received no money for. These innovations include the TCP/IP stack everyone is familiar with.
5. There where many attempts to release a community UNIX continuation, including some of the BSD people, porting BSD with the AT&T parts replaced to the then new 386, which later became FreeBSD
6. That gets us to RMS and the FSF which started earlier, but instead of porting existing software, tried an ambitious re-write including centering around the mach microkernel. It turns out that such a project was far more ambitious then they anticipated, and went on for years with no real usable kernel
7. Later, about 7-8 years later, a grad student wants to run UNIX on his PC, but the best he gets is MINIX, which is a simplified version for teaching OS design. So he re-works the kernel to be more powerful.
8. He finds Minix to be quite limited, so he ports to GNU which had every intention on being a full strength production OS, but lacked a kernel. Lets be clear that GNU existed for several years at this point. Linux adopted the GPL which linux said "was the best thing to ever happen to linux", and targeted the GNU toolchain for builds. Yes, it is in fact a seperate project, but it targets GNU. Even if that changed now, it wouldn't erase the decades of history where linux exists because the GNU toolchain used to build it.
9. Operating system history is better documented than compiler and toolchain history. But from what I can gather, gcc was by far the best Free compiler/toolchain, and its single handedly responsible for giving Free operating systems and other software a leg up in the early years. FreeBSD used it after switching away from AT&T's pcc. Free software in modern form really wouldn't exist without GCC + toolchain
The beauty of Free software as a concept, is just because the original author had one idea about the software, you don't have to share their vision, you can fork it, and then add/remove features as you see fit.
So, RMS lost touch a very long time ago, but because of the IDEALs of Free software, its possible for everyone else to just pick it up and go in whatever direction is needed. It removes the single point of failure.
I can acknowledge his past contributions and admire his vision of software ideology, but he really needed to retire 10 or even 15 years ago, at least.
1. for those who like public domain:
Check out CC0 by creative commons
2. Regardless of what RMS has done in previous years, he is woefully out of touch with the needs of both tech activism, and needs most users have with modern computing devices. he still spends most of the time on the command line, sans X, only starting X for things like web browsers and such.
3. The FSF has been lost, and close to rudderless for decades, and most of the slack has been picked up elsewhere. The campaign against unfree javascript while crucial technologies like Replicant languish and are backburnered. It might be true while a lot of these people where inspired by previous actions of the FSF in previous DECADES, they have hardly been on the front lines of tech for a very very long time.
There is a lot of trolling, copypasta, and shitposting, of which is to be expected in a high profile drama thread. I am going to post this for the uniniated reading this who may want a straight answer.
1. UNIX came first. Lets be really honest about what UNIX was, and why it grew. UNIX was developed at AT&T bell labs. It was NOT originally a commercial project because AT&T was not allowed to sell computer stuff being a state sanctioned monopoly. It was made because it was useful internally. AT&T shared the source code because it couldn't sell it. Often, because everyone had the source code, people would fix bugs and sent back fixes to AT&T, and each other. One such big user of UNIX was Berkeley University, a public university that developed fixes and tools that ran on UNIX and distributed those for Free. Much of this software got included in later AT&T versions of UNIX. This software package was known as the Berkley Software Distribution. You likely know it by the acronym BSD.
2. There was a culture of sharing software that revolved around UNIX. Humans don't live in a vacuum. There is a relation between culture and tech. Long have cultures formed around users of similar machines. So even if this was made largely by a company. It was distributed with source code, and there where a community of programmers that enjoyed sharing code that came from the environment.
3. UNIX was made close source in the 80s, and AT&T was allowed to license and sell UNIX so it did. Many companies at this stage sold computers with UNIX derived operating systems. BSD itself was still free, but need an operating system to run on, of which was no longer free.
4. There were a lot of people at this time that enjoyed and wanted to continue the community that revolved around UNIX now that AT&T was no longer offering UNIX for free. Many of these people are programmers, just as good as AT&T, and have provided code that was later included in UNIX which AT&T profited off, of which they received no money for. These innovations include the TCP/IP stack everyone is familiar with.
5. There where many attempts to release a community UNIX continuation, including some of the BSD people, porting BSD with the AT&T parts replaced to the then new 386, which later became FreeBSD
6. That gets us to RMS and the FSF which started earlier, but instead of porting existing software, tried an ambitious re-write including centering around the mach microkernel. It turns out that such a project was far more ambitious then they anticipated, and went on for years with no real usable kernel
7. Later, about 7-8 years later, a grad student wants to run UNIX on his PC, but the best he gets is MINIX, which is a simplified version for teaching OS design. So he re-works the kernel to be more powerful.
8. He finds Minix to be quite limited, so he ports to GNU which had every intention on being a full strength production OS, but lacked a kernel. Lets be clear that GNU existed for several years at this point. Linux adopted the GPL which linux said "was the best thing to ever happen to linux", and targeted the GNU toolchain for builds. Yes, it is in fact a seperate project, but it targets GNU. Even if that changed now, it wouldn't erase the decades of history where linux exists because the GNU toolchain used to build it.
9. Operating system history is better documented than compiler and toolchain history. But from what I can gather, gcc was by far the best Free compiler/toolchain, and its single handedly responsible for giving Free operating systems and other software a leg up in the early years. FreeBSD used it after switching away from AT&T's pcc. Free software in modern form really wouldn't exist without GCC + toolchain
The beauty of Free software as a concept, is just because the original author had one idea about the software, you don't have to share their vision, you can fork it, and then add/remove features as you see fit.
So, RMS lost touch a very long time ago, but because of the IDEALs of Free software, its possible for everyone else to just pick it up and go in whatever direction is needed. It removes the single point of failure.
I can acknowledge his past contributions and admire his vision of software ideology, but he really needed to retire 10 or even 15 years ago, at least.
Comment