On Jun 1, 2014, at 8:09 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote: > Phil Garcia wrote: > I've always wondered about something > else, though: Were the original Unix authors annoyed when they learned that > some irascible young upstart named Richard Stallman was determined to make > a free Unix clone? Was he a gadfly, or just some kook you decided to > ignore? The fathers of Unix have been strangely silent on this topic for > many years. Maybe nobody's ever asked? In private moments, some of the BSD old-timers have told me they are silent due to bad blood that Stallman’s early fund-raising and propaganda efforts created. Why rehash 20 year old battles with an obvious nutcase, eh? Since more than one person has told me this, so I think silence is a wide-spread case of “If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all." > Gnu was always taken as a compliment. And of course the Unix clone > was pie in the sky until Linus came along. I wonder about the power > relationship underlying "GNU/Linux", as rms modestly styles it. Of course, it should be noted that the GNU project was totally incapable of producing a working kernel… They did decent clones of user land stuff, but Hurd was a total dead end... > There are certain differences in taste between Unix and Gnu, vide > emacs and texinfo. (I grit my teeth every time a man page tells me, > "The full documentation for ___ is maintained as a Texinfo file.") > But all disagreement is swept away before the fact that the old > familiar environment is everywhere, from Cray to Apple, with rms > a very important contributor. Emacs is awesome…. Warner -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 842 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: