Interview With Richard Stallman 807
An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating and lengthy interview with Richard Stallman who founded the GNU Project in 1984, and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. He also originally authored a number of well known and highly used development tools, including the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB) and GNU Emacs.
The interview covers a wide range of topics, from rms's early years, to his current role in the Free Software Foundation. He discusses the current state of GNU/Hurd, the problems with non-free software, and much more."
Re:He Doesn't Get It (Score:3, Informative)
Stallman on Media (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/articles/stall
Re:Don't you mean (Score:2, Informative)
He doesn't insist on that at all! He asks that the GNU system that uses Linux as a kernel be referred to as GNU/Linux, for the reasons he gives in the article. Linux should be called Linux all day long when the topic of conversation is Linux (ie. the Kernel).
Are people deliberately being ignorant on this matter or is there a problem with their hearing or reading skills? I can't imagine the issue being explained more clearly than in the interview.
Re:GNU/Linux? No. (Score:5, Informative)
GNU libc had reached a state where it was too substantial for volunteer maintainers to make more progress (though I'll readily admit those volunteers did an amazing job getting libc to that point). Red Hat paid someone to turn it into a product for them.
Uli is hardly a saint. And don't get me started on my personal run-ins with the guy.
As for egcs, same story but s/Red Hat/Cygnus Solutions/.
Short version: GNU needed some heavy lifting. Some enlightened members of corporate America stepped up to the plate.
And in doing so, proved RMS right and put Linux on the map at the same time. GNU/Linux.
There is no force involved. (Score:3, Informative)
There's no force involved. If you don't like the GPL, don't choose to distribute programs licensed under it. There are entire free software operating systems written by people who are working hard to rewrite GPL-covered programs because they don't like the strong copyleft implemented in the GPL.
Quite to the contrary of what you're saying, the reason the BSD licenses qualify as free software licenses is because they grant the licensee the freedoms free software talks about.
Re:He Doesn't Get It (Score:4, Informative)
He doesn't want to take it away from you. He never says that, and he says quite the opposite.
From his site: [fsf.org]
"Why not sue people who call the whole system "Linux"?
There are no legal grounds to sue them, but since we believe in freedom of speech, we wouldn't want to do that anyway. We ask people to call the system "GNU/Linux" because that is the right thing to do.
Shouldn't you put something in the GNU GPL to require people to call the system "GNU"?
The purpose of the GNU GPL is to protect the users' freedom from those who would make proprietary versions of free software. While it is true that those who call the system "Linux" often do things that limit the users' freedom, such as bundling non-free software with the GNU/Linux system or even developing non-free software for such use, the mere act of calling the system "Linux" does not, in itself, deny users their freedom. It seems improper to make the GPL restrict what name people can use for the system."
Could that be any clearer?
The actual contributors (Score:3, Informative)
Well, this [gnu.org] is linked to from the project front page, plus there's the MAINTAINERS file in the top of the source tree (although that lists the active maintainers and their responsibilities, not everybody-at-any-time-ever). Yah, Mark's one of them.
GCC isn't like the Linux kernel, where the development teams are formed around cults of personalities, and /.ers eagerly congregate to hear the heated flame wars between their favorites. :-) The GCC people are way milder, way less vitriolic, and as a result, don't make the tabloid news.
The inflammatory statements made on LKML concern stuff like DRM and proprietary drivers and things about which more Linux users actually care (or even understand). Inflammatory statements on the GCC list are of the kind which only arouse the ire of other compiler geeks. We can almost get into fistfights at the annual summit over whether a combined CSE and DCE pass should be done even when optimization is off ("the Laffer curve argues for-" "bah, users shouldn't notice!"), but nobody on /. will care. *grin*
Re:GNU/Linux? No. (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Cue the assinine comments... (Score:3, Informative)
As always, we get into the problem that different people use 'free' to mean different things; but I don't think BSD-style licences are particularly 'about free software' under any of them.
-
If you want to give people total freedom to do what they want with your code, then you should make it public domain and explicitly disclaim any copyright on it. Any licence (BSD, GPL, or whatever) is more restrictive than this.
-
If you want your source code to be available wherever and however people use it, which is very roughly the FSF meaning, then the GPL is more free than BSD-style ones.
-
If you want your application to be available at no cost, then a simple traditional Freeware-type of licence does more to ensure this than BSD.
For each of these meanings, BSD-style licences are less 'free' than other options. They're just one way of balancing the various restrictions and intentions; the GPL is another. Use whichever best suits your intentions, but don't claim it's more 'free'.Re:Cue the assinine comments... (Score:2, Informative)
I hesitate to respond to this, but because the rest of your post looks basically serious, I'm afraid that this ludicrous comment might not be a joke.
A human being will die without salt: It is a requirement for life. If your staple foods do not provide enough salt, you must supplement your diet with more salt. When a foreign power is occupying your country and enriching itself through taxes on a life-sustaining nutrient like salt, it makes sense to defy the occupier and encourage your people to take their own salt, for free, from the sea.
I'm sure you could find legitimate grounds on which to criticize Gandhi (or any other great leader), but don't be silly. It undermines everything else you say.
Re:oh. that man is sooo funny.... (Score:4, Informative)
RMS has a million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and permanent facilities at his disposal at MIT, one of the best-equipped universities in the world. He is unmarried and has no children.
He can afford high-handed morals. Regular folks don't have that luxury. And it is a luxury; RMS has the money to live the lifestyle he wants to lead. Real people have real responsibilities.
Re:Speaking of GCC... (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, I think you mean the 1960s. Compiling into an intermediate language and then feeding that to a code generator in a separate pass was invented very early in the history of compilers. It's not just a way of compiling multiple languages; it's also a useful technique for compiling on the machines of < 64K bytes (which was a large machine back then). Right from the start, it was common for compilers to have many passes, with the job split up so that each pass would fit into memory.
I've also ready some of the history of the early Fortran compilers (1950s). One of their challenges was to convince people that a compiler could generate assembly code comparable to what a human could write. This meant that the first Fortran compilers did a fair amount of what came to be called "optimizing". Some of this was done in later passes, by munging the intermediate language. This made sense, because the intermediate language was generally more logical, consistent and orthogonal than the input language(s), making the task much easier.
Fact is, Microsoft is trying to get away with patenting one of the oldest of compiler techniques. Next we're going to read that they've patented the concept of a "lexical" pass that chops the input stream into tokens and replaces each token with an index into an internal symbol table.
The best answer to such idiocy is to just admit we made a big mistake, and eliminate software patents.
Re:OSS is Personal Freedom (Score:2, Informative)
Apple can make changes and improvements on the BSD-licensed code-base they use and are not require to give their changes back to the community if they choose to distribute their binaries. I don't even particularly like the GPL philosophy (I am entering this comment in Mozilla on a NetBSD 2.0 box) and I understand that 'dilemma.'
Apple and many other commercial enterprises make use of BSD-licensed source code and contribute as much or as little back as they choose.