Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later | Hacker News Reader

Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later

opensource.com

152 pointsjhibbets31 comments

Happy Birthday indeed.

I think there is not enough appreciation how GNU and GPL improved technology in these last decades. Just imagine how many tools we get as open source today and expect to be open source - OS kernels, compilers, databases, desktop environments, browsers, libraries, toolkits, etc. They are not all GPL, but strongly believe that had GPL and Stallman not been there we wouldn't have had other open source licenses either and we would have had to pay for most of it.

At the same time I think we are losing a lot of that due to the trend of everything becoming a service. We losing tremendously in regards to privacy in general. The other story on the front page today is how Facebook is using 2FA phone numbers and selling them to advertisers. Yesterday we talked about Google moving to China where people can and will be imprisoned, tortured and killed as a result of a company like Google turning over users data. The irony there is that many of the tech giants that do those things have built their stack on GNU software (GCC, Linux), can imagine a bit how Stallman would feel about that.

EDIT: Found this recent 2018 interview with him regarding privacy and what the tech giants are doing these days : http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/richard-stallman-rms-on-p...

I think the staying power of GNU and the GPL and associated projects is due in large part to the so-called "viral" nature of the license – code that is GPL'ed must remain GPL'ed, and thus is still available with all the original rights due to the end-user as it had, and never less.

I don't think we would be where we are at right now had it not been for this, and for the ardent, strong stand free software advocates that pushed to keep it that way.

Is the GPL a panacea? No, and I don't think anyone believes that (even RMS agreed that Vorbis should be BSD licensed when it was released). But the fact that it rubbed some people the wrong way (and still does) was worth it for the long-term beneficial outcome we got because of it.

> Found this recent 2018 interview with him regarding > privacy and what the tech giants are doing these days

Isn't it an cutting irony that you can not read it without accepting cookies from nymag.com?

The problem is too many people consider that not a choice but just an little annoyance.

You could buy the magazine...

You could stop using software to escape its privacy invasion, but I'd rather not.

I am not aware that nymag is available where I live.

Not just privacy though. The larger point of starting the GNU project was to allow for freedom to prosper. Stallman understood an important thing about software : it is a great servent, but a terrible master. He realized that being unable to study the software we use, to modify it and give those improvements to others would mean that it would end up as a tool of oppression.

Today, how much control do you have over the technology you depend on ? Search engines can bias search results to get you to think in one way and not another. Social networks can censor you and control what type of information you are allowed to see. Your data is locked up in data centers of Big Tech and they could pull the plug any time causing you a lot of damage.

The irony is that some of these companies were built on the software developed by FSF

I'm going to go with the guys who said gcc - I was thinking that as I read the subheading before I read the individual comments. It's just there on every system I use, or available to install quickly.

I've used C and C++ compilers that compiled code quicker, or compiled it smaller, or more optimized, that have more copyright notices when invoked, or take more or less time to install, but gcc is ubiquitous, easy to use and (mostly) stays out of your face.

The other day I wanted to write some code for an emulator which uses Musashi (68000 CPU emulator). In about 30 or so minutes, I was able to grab the latest binutils+gcc source from ftp.gnu.org, build a cross compiler and compile some code for m68k-elf, objdump it and load it in the emulator. To me anyway, that is pretty awesome.

I remember times where compilers were hard to come by, expensive and buggy, most people take gcc for a given nowadays, but it's such a treasure.

I think GNU and open source will have a long-lasting impact on science as well. One of its contributions is that now we can point to computer science (esp. in areas like cryptography) as an example of an area where code and methodology etc. are shared openly, setting an example for scientists in more traditional areas, like chemists and biologists, in becoming less closed-fist about their experiments.

Going forward, I think we should also emphasize "free data" practices.

When you say free data, how does that compare, in your mind, to open data? Are they the same?

Happy Birthday, GNU.

While we live in an Open Source World, we wouldn't have the world of Apache2.0, BSD, and MIT that we currently enjoy without the hard fought cultural and legal battles GNU and its GPL fought and won.

While people may say GPL's time has passed, let them. Their comments aren't visible to us without dozens of GPL'd systems (linux servers) silently and faithfully providing the strongest counter point possible just outside of sight.

Happy birthday to the project that enabled the revolution in computing that we are enjoying today. Free access to quality code and stuff that helps us all grow as human beings!

\o/

I'm a bit sad when I read the url of this post.

> https://opensource.com/article/18/9/happy-birthday-gnu

why?

because open source, that's why

Open source advocates love GNU too, even if the love doesn't go both ways.

Open source solves a business problem and would NOT exist without GNU or free software. Here's a good read about the term open source: https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

y2k was a long time ago and y3k isn't our problem. :p

It was a good guess. I hadn't noticed, but it's a bit ironic that after y2k, we're still making our software work with 2 digit years.

Some of us might live to see y2.1k

Considering the crucial role of Linux in bringing free software to the mainstream, this discussion is particularly interesting https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

I wonder if GNU project will ever be complete. I mean - the main goal was to create an operating system, correct? And AFAIK thanks to Linux it was possible to run plenty of GNU stuff but kernel (GNU Herd) is still not done. Does it mean that GNU project will never be completed? It's kind of sad if you ask me.

According to Stallman GNU is "done" as Linux is a GPL'd kernel. There isn't a reason for GNU to -make- their own in-org kernel when a perfectly functional GPL'd alternate exist.

If you are a big on "purity" there are `make` flags to avoid bundling proprietary blobs. So its not like you are even giving up your ideological idealism using a GNU/Linux OS.

GNU project was already complete in late 80s -- early 90s. Hurd is currently a research project with no intention to replace linux. See, GNU and Linux have a sort of bittersweet history, but no matter which side you are in, if you just think rationally for a bit you'll realize GNU+Linux is the only future of both GNU and Linux. Even leaders of both parties, Stallman and Torvalds agree with this.

GNU+Linux is the only future of both GNU and Linux

Android is Linux without GNU, so it's not hard to imagine a different future (whether it's desirable is a different question). Android has no GNU in user space -- it's almost all Apache and BSD licensed.

And I'm pretty sure the build toolchain is Clang and not GCC.

Though I hope the values of GNU continue to be important in the software world. Linux and GNU have different viewpoints and I think we need them both.

> And I'm pretty sure the build toolchain is Clang and not GCC.

Yes, Google took the effort of making Linux compilable with clang, then they deprecated gcc and with the latest NDK release (R18) gcc has gotten finally the boot from Android.

I hurd next year.

1. GNU Hurd is usable by those interested, but obviously still needs a lot of work to be generally usable.

2. These days, GNU Hurd isn't GNU's only kernel. GNU Linux-libre is a fork of the Linux kernel that removes support for non-free binary blobs, and is officially part of the GNU project.

3. There's a distribution called GuixSD, which takes the GNU package manager (GNU Guix) and the GNU init system (GNU Shepherd), and the choice of GNU kernels (GNU Hurd or GNU Linux-libre), and builds a complete system out of them. It's easy to make the case that GuixSD is the GNU system in everything but name. And even then, there's the ongoing possibility that GuixSD becomes "blessed" as the complete GNU system and renames to GNU.

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