RMS Turns 50

gnuhead writes "RMS is turning 50 on the 16th, according to this post in the FSF India mailing list. Some of the members have decided to give a birthday gift to RMS by celebrating March 16th to April 15th as 'GNU/Linux' month, and having a 'It's GNU/Linux dammit!' email sig. for this month. Happy birthday RMS!!!"

How very like rms

[fw3]

50th birthday--not ordinarily an occasion for joy. But your support will make it a happy birthday.

To take even the occaision of his birthday as something political.

I guess it's his party and all :-)

Gosh..

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like only yesterday when I was borrowing his account on gnu.ai.mit.edu to move some files and nearly deleted GCC 1.17 (1988).

It was late at night and I had typed 'rm gcc-1.17' instead of 'cd gcc-1.17'..

Of course nothing happened, but a friend watched me do it and we both freaked out.

Where would we be now if I had deleted RMS's gcc master! ;-)

Need I say how incredibly cool he is to have shared his account with so many needy folks back in the day..

Re:a typo?

[stevejsmith]

"Dammit" is the de facto standard for running "damn" and "it" together to form an interjection. The difference lies in that "dammit" is an interjection, while "damn it" is a verb and a noun. When you say "damn it," you are damning whatever "it" may be. When you say "dammit" you're just showing a sign of anger or frusteration. Nice try...but no.

Re:GNU/Linux, fah!

[Executive Override]

No... This would be like busting your ass to build a house, assemble everything from scratch, build the walls, the pumbling, everything. When it's time to build the roof, you stall a bit and then some Finish "kid" comes and builds the roof for you. Great, but all of a sudden eveyone is saying "hey man, can I go to your roof?", "At what address is your roof?", etc... "Damn it", you say, "it's a HOUSE!". And then they call you an egotist.

GNU/Linux fah how bout RedHat.

[nlinecomputers]

I'm not one to call it Linux or GNU whatever. I run RedHat or Mandrake. A distro is collection of a kernal and lots of tools that are setup according to a set method. The way to run things like for example the location of files on RedHat != the setup used by Debian. Linux is the kernel. Many of the tools are from FSF and are GNU/n. But what I run is RH.

That's exactly why it should be called...

[BoomerSooner]

GNU/Linux Distribution

Not GNU/Linux because Linux is independent of GNU.

So when saying I use Linux you're refering to the use of the Linux kernel as the base of your system.

When you say you're using Red Hat Linux you are refering to a specific Distribution that uses Linux and GNU Tools and is packaged by a third party for easy install, technical support and donation of expertise to the Linux/GNU communities.

I guess I dont see the need to append GNU because I don't frequently see people say I'm using FreeBSD-Based/Darwin/Mac OS X or I'm using SysV/Solaris (or whatever the hell it's based on).

Plus I'd like to see the GNU Tools run on a kernel other than Linux (OSS not Commercial). Hurd is POS, if a good kernel were that easy, why is Hurd so far behind?

Guess the kernel isn't that unimportant afterall.

My first RMS memory

[dark-nl]

When I was just a little kid, my father pointed at a picture in a magazine and said, "This man says that software should be free. He wrote an editor."

I didn't get it at the time. From my point of view, all software was free, and its normal mode of distribution was as source listings in magazines.

It was more than a decade later when I realized he must have been talking about RMS. And now I get the point, too. It's been ages since I saw a source listing in a magazine. Without free software, the next generation of hackers would have had nothing to tinker with.

Re:GNU/Linux, fah!

[Caligari]

I like to refer to it as 'GNU/Linux' because this way you are acknowledging the ideals of Free Software.

People who have no awareness of 'freeness' of software or the issues involved perhaps will be curious and try to find out more about this mysterious acronym. This is precisely what happened to me after running 'Linux' before I knew anything about GNU. I have since myself spread information about Free software to many others.

I think the "Stallman wants to 0wn Linux!!!" line is childish and petty. Why not see it for what it is - an advertisement for open and enlightened attitudes. Call it GNU/Linux 'mommy's testicles' if you want, but don't hold it against the man for seeking some (deserved) recognition - not even for himself directly - but for his positive ideology.

Re:not gnu

[GrimReality]

Before saying something, I have to say that I am a Linus, RMS and Eric fan --believe it or not-- inspite of all the radically different viewpoints each of the three has. So don't think that I am supporting any one group.

Here are a few points that I would like to clarify:

1. As others would have already pointed out, the GNU people do not want credit for Linux.
2. One might also note that GNU is not a very marketing friendly name --well most FSF names aren't since they were made by, using Slashdot terms, 'nerds' for 'nerds'. So is Linus, but he happened to give a really cool name and a really cute mascot. Compare this to the gnu head of FSF.
3. In fact, it is the name 'Linux', although unintentionally, that has eclipsed GNU efforts, thanks mostly to commercial distributions.
4. In a loose sense, Linus Torvalds is also one of the 'GNU people'. Of course one can argue otherwise on technicality, especially, since Linus himself has used the term 'GNU people' in the sense that he did not belong to it.

Okey, I agree I am being a toady and humbug, but hey, I am not as smart as you guys --show some pity on your inferior.

Thank you.

Grim Reality
2003-03-17 00:09:24 UTC (2003-03-16 19:09:24 EST)

Re:Gosh..

[SN74S181]

Sharing accounts has a long tradition among the hackers. Back in the old days of UNIX, people like Richard Stallman refused to password protect their accounts on principle.

Now, of course, people who don't password protect their accounts with totally obscure number/letter/symbol sequences are ostracized.

That's gotta bug Richard at least a little.

The best present you can give, to him and yoursel

[SuperKendall]

A donation [fsf.org] to the FSF is good for everyone.

For Emacs alone, we all owe him.

So we short-shrift MIT, BSD & the rest?

[llywrch]

But the GUI is based on MIT's development, so shouldn't we call it GNU/MIT/Linux? And Perl & Python follow other licenses. And BTW, a number of important packages included in Linux distributions are available under the BSD license.

Why *don't* we call it ``GNU/MIT/BSD/Apache/Perl/Python/Linux"?

Or what about the fact most computers with Solaris also have various GNU utilities installed. Most of the time, the same ones that come with a Linux distribution? Why don't we call it ``GNU/Solaris". heck, it would make troubleshooting problems with a Solaris box far easier.

RMS was presented with these very same questions a few months ago on LWN, & like a broken computer program, all he could say was ``It's not the same thing" & talk around the question. He wants to talk about ``GNU/Linux". Anything else involving a program where the code was freely available matters doesn't matter to him.

As I see it, someone took RMS's idea of free software & extended it. Made the software even more free. And RMS is having problems getting his head around that fact. Too bad for him; I'm still going to call it Linux.

Geoff

Re:GNU/Linux, fah!

[Blkdeath]

Yes, a great legal invention that any company with sense won't touch with a 10 foot pole. Viral licensing doesn't go well in the business world.

Yeah, I guess IBM dropping USD $1Billion on Linux is a means of protest against the GPL, right?

Riiiiiiight.

Re:My first RMS memory

[Virtex]

I remember the days of typing in programs from the pages of magazines like COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, RUN magazine, and Ahoy!. I tend to believe it was these types of magazines that got me into programming in the first place, and I often wonder if I would be into programming today if it were not for them. I also remember when COMPUTE! stopped publishing code because, according to them, their readers no longer wanted it. I never renewed with them after that. It's too bad kids today don't have resources like this to get them into programming like they did for me and so many others.

Happy b-day, Richard!

[scubacuda]

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - THAT is genius.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

--Lao-Tzu

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. You can quote them. Disagree with them. Glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

--Apple Computer Advertisement

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

--Albert Einstein

The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.

--Arthur Koestler

Happy b-day, Richard!

Believe it or not, every time I fire up my GNU/Linux boxen, I think to myself, "Damn, I SO appreciate the mofos before me who created this stuff."

my favorite RMS story

[e40]

Around '82 I was a staff member at UCB. RMS was visiting Fateman (a prof at UCB) for the summer and was sharing the shared office with me and a bunch of grad students. I had heard a little about RMS, but I wasn't really prepared for the real thing.

First off, when I introduced myself and extended my hand, well, you know, he just shook his hands in the air at me. Then, as I was talking he took out a wood flute and started playing and dancing. He would stop playing only to ask questions or make comments.

Then, once we had been talking for a little bit, he told me about the evil people at Symbolics that sold software that had been written at MIT. He said they were no better than "thieves and arsonists". The "arsonists" bit was so funny that I started to laugh. He got really upset and started yelling at me. Problem is, I thought he was joking and I just laughed harder.

OK, 2 stories:

Fateman invited RMS over to dinner at his house. Just before the appointed time RMS shows up with a box of pastries. He asks for plate and puts the pastries on it. Fateman's two daughters (early teens) are like "cool, pastries for desert!!" However, as dinner started the real purpose of the pastries was revealed: they were his dinner and he was not going to share.

Why celebrate?

[generic-man]

RMS famously spewed out a huge flame [art.net] when someone posted a birth announcement to a mailing list he read. To quote the madman himself: "Could people please not use this list to announce information of no particular interest to the people on the list? Hundreds of thousands of babies are born every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy. Nor is it a difficult achievement--even some fish can do it."

Could people please not use Slashdot to anounce information of no particular interest to anybody? Hundreds of thousands of people turn 50 every day. While the whole phenomenon is menacing, one of them by itself is not newsworthy.