In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
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In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#2If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence.
The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#3God, 8 tweets in I realized I'm reading yet another long-winded tale, 1 tweet at a time.
With subplots of thanking people for t-shirts... FFS!
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#4Wow, how brave of you. In the meantime, millions of users everywhere use GNU userspace tools.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#5If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence. The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
On the contrary, sometimes the terms used do matter, whether they are a name or not. That's why FSF informs people why they prefer to use the terms like "Free Software" instead of "Open Source". It might not matter now that everybody switched to the web but 20 years ago this talking about Open Source lead to, among others, the so-called "Shared Source Initiative" that was neither fish nor fowl.
Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible.
*) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#6What a great story.
I remember being annoyed as well by the GNU/Linux thing.
All that preaching (was RHS the original SJW?) pushed me to experiment with BSD.
I also enjoy using Alpine quite a bit (even if it might have some GNU packages)
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#7There's a funny tyler1 quote (popular LoL streamer) about how oftentimes he meets fans and they'll say something like "Haha remember that time I won this game against you doing this?" He responds absolutely not, you will always remember that game as the one time you won against someone famous, for me it was like any other day being famous.
Seeing an entire thread of people not just being petty, but dogpiling onto a five minute conversation that happened in 2001 gives me the same sort of feeling. There is absolutely no way RMS remembers or cares about this one dude giggling to himself over this !GNU operating system.
It would be much funnier if Twitter wasn't completely incapable of chilling for five seconds.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#8If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence. The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
Are you saying it's not a major political defeat when a government officially renames "videosurveillance" to "videoprotection" across the country (France)? I'd recommend rereading Orwell's 1984 if you haven't in a long time.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#9If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence. The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
GNU is special because without them, the whole system wouldn't exist. They did:
1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system.
2. Most of the ideological work
3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too)
They're the original "inventor."
Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that.
Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software").
It's hard to overstate this contribution.
Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
#10If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence. The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
The GPL certainly does require attribution in the licence; it's not all that clear how it could work otherwise given that copyright relies upon copyright holders suing for copyright infringement.