6 Jan
2019
6 Jan
'19
3:52 a.m.
On Sat, Jan 05, 2019 at 04:38:40PM -0500, A. P. Garcia wrote:
On Sat, Jan 5, 2019, 3:27 PM Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com wrote:
I'll remind you all of a story I'm sure I shared here in the past.
I was friends with the 3 Cygnus founders and I was having a dinner
with them at Gumby's house. (This is an aside but it is important:
Gumby was, at that time, married to a very nice German woman named
Silka; she still had a pretty strong accent, English was not her
first language).
Cygnus was pretty much a 100% GPL / LGPL shop. So the discussions
were all "RMS this", "RMS that" and went on for a long time (hours).
Silka was clearing the table and she pipes up with "Are you saying
'RMS this'?" We say yes, and she responds with "Huh, all this time I
heard 'Our mess this', 'Our mess that'". We all looked at each
other
in silence, sort of replaying everying through that view. And started
laughing (and freaking out a little) that every sentence made sense as
"Our mess <whatever>".
I'm clearly not a fan of RMS, yeah, he did some good but in the process
he took credit for an enormous body of work in which he didn't write a
line of code. As a programmer, that's lieing and I can't stand liars.
And that's all I have to say on the RMS topic, it's probably too much
as it is.
On 1/5/19, A. P. Garcia
<a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[concerning Richard Stallman]
But RMS sort of invented that community, just like Al Gore sort of invented
the internet (as we know it today). He was certainly an important catalyst,
and his views remain influential to many people.
Building an operating system in and of itself was not so much his goal as
building the friendships and community surrounding it.
The GNU Hurd kernel certainly seems to have gotten nowhere, and with
the success of Linux IMO the free software community doesn't need it
anymore. But FSF certainly has made a big impact and contribution
with the gcc toolchain and the free versions of the Unix shell and
utilities.