[TUHS] Gnu/Stallman (was Bugs in V6 'dcheck')

[grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)]

On Sunday,  1 June 2014 at 20:59:13 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> On Jun 1, 2014, at 8:09 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> 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."

But now you've said something, and it's not nice.

Clearly this is indicative of the standpoints of the others as well.
A lot is simply personality conflict.  As you know, I don't share that
opinion, and I think the emphasis that FreeBSD places on ridding
itself of GNU software is unhealthy.  Yes, rms is "unusual", but that
goes for a lot of the BSD crowd too.  And I know enough people in the
Linux space who dislike him as well.

>> 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...

But if you state that, you need to analyse why.  I think the big issue
was the grandiose goals that they set.  And who knows what might have
happened if Linux and the free BSDs hadn't come along?  I don't think
it's fair to simply dismiss it as a dead end.

>> There are certain differences in taste between Unix and Gnu, vide
>> emacs and texinfo...
>
> Emacs is awesome?.

Not part of my vocabulary, but I couldn't live without Emacs.  Shall
we degrade this discussion into a vi/Emacs fight?

Greg
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