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In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

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Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

#12

Post by jlkuester7 »

subjectsigma wrote: post #7

There'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 f…

This was basically my original take on the tweet. But after reading the whole thread, there is quite a bit more to the story that makes it interesting (to me at least).

Dunking on RMS in one 5min conversation is only slightly amusing. But getting publicly harangued by RMS for something petty, then spending the next year assembling a working Linux system with no GNU software (which required personally writing some of the parts), all for the purposes of catching RMS in his pettiness the next year, that is a pretty cool story. Still mostly about 1-upping someone in their pettiness, but at least real effort was put into it! :)

As an aside, the "I am going to build this just because I can" attitude is one of my favorite parts of software development. The barriers to entry are so low and the field of possibilities is so wide that it is really fun to see what folks come up with (and hack on stuff myself). Even if 90% of everything is crap...

Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

#13

Post by karteum »

blagie wrote: post #9
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #2

If 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…

> _but without Linux, Hurd would still eventually be ready_

"eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)

Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

#16

Post by pjmlp »

karteum wrote: post #13
blagie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> _but without Linux, Hurd would still eventually be ready_ "eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)

Commercial UNIXes would have kept leeching BSD code rather.

Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

#19

Post by pydry »

ferdowsi wrote: post #15
the_biot wrote: post #14

Quoted post unavailable.

Funny that this would be used in defense of Stallman, a zealot who built his whole public personality on supposed "speaking truth to power". He literally called Microsoft "the Great Satan."

Which views exactly make him such a zealot?

He certainly suffers from speaking truth to power. Bill Gates suffered no consequences for flying on the lolita express (other than maybe a divorced wife) while Stallman was canceled because of some fairly mundane commentary on Epstein.

It's an odd artefact of American culture that statements made by people who stand to gain nothing materially and potentially lose a lot (e.g. Stallman) are so frequently given less weight than those who have a strong financial interest (Microsoft's "we love open source now no really").

Re: In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face

#20

Post by mid-kid »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #2

If 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.

I'd like to give a practical argument as to why the term matters beyond attribution: There's several incompatible userspaces for Linux.

GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem.

Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.

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