Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

["A. P. Garcia" <a.phillip.garcia@gmail.com>]

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On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 10:39 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com wrote:

> +1.  RMS always talked big but the real work was done by other people.
> GCC was Tiemann at Sun and then at Cygnus, groff was James Clark,
> etc.  I think RMS hacked on emacs but not much else.
>

I'm going to refrain from either praising or disparaging the man. I think
the book Hackers by Steven Levy does a good job of describing him and how
the idea for the GNU project came about. I'm going to paraphrase what I
remember from it, but it's been a long time since I read it.

If I recall correctly, stallman graduated summa cum laude with a physics
degree from Harvard. He spent many of his undergrad days and nights working
at the MIT AI lab. Among his character defects, I've never heard anyone
accuse him of being a dumb guy. Awkward, yes, strange, perhaps, but not
dumb.

At the AI lab he found a place where he fit in. The systems ran ITS, an MIT
homegrown operating system. It was an open environment where people debated
technical issues over Chinese take-out, an intellectual society in which
Stallman felt at home as a rightful citizen.

The camaraderie he knew there dissolved as its members struck out to become
entrepreneurs. My memory is fuzzy here, but I believe his main nemesis was
Symbolics, marketers of a proprietary version of MIT's CADR Lisp machine
and operating system. As they released system updates, Stallman would would
reverse engineer the changes and add the new features to the MIT system.

Around the same time, ITS was being replaced on the computers by
proprietary operating systems. Stallman began running into roadblocks, bugs
in the OS where the code was not available to fix. To access the code he
would have to sign an NDA, which he refused to do.

In short, his little utopia collapsed. The lab as he knew it was gone. He
wondered to himself whether he could rebuild it somehow, and this was the
inception of the GNU project. He chose to re-implement Unix, not because he
considered it an ideal operating system but because he considered it
adequate. (I am among those on this list who would beg to differ.) He has
said many times that he does not agree with the Unix philosophy, but I
don't know specifically what he means by this.

Building an operating system in and of itself was not so much his goal as
building the friendships and community surrounding it.



> On Fri, Jan 04, 2019 at 09:35:53PM -0500, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> > Yep, it???s pretty superficial when it comes to looking at where we are
> today.
> > Further, the puppy love over RMS is entirely unjustified.   He was in
> the right place with a rant about the industry but he???s oft unduly
> credited by a lot of the early GNU hangers on like Len Tower who made the
> project a success in spite
> > of RMS.
> >
> > If anybody truly knew RMS they???d not tolerate any of this.   He???s
> the most odiferous, objectionable, sexist, pedophile I have ever met
> (though I???ve not met the President yet).
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy                  lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>

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