2 Jun
2014
2 Jun
'14
8:59 a.m.
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."
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