On Sunday, 1 June 2014 at 20:59:13 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
On Jun 1, 2014, at 8:09 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)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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