The Shaggy God - Richard Stallman in Boston Magazine | Hacker News Reader

The Shaggy God - Richard Stallman in Boston Magazine

bostonmagazine.com

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"Strictly speaking, the complete operating system should have been called GNU/Linux, representing the combined contributions of Stallman and Torvalds. Stallman always insists on the term, pronouncing it "GNU slash Linux." But in the popular mind, it came to be known as only Linux. Stallman has never gotten over that."

The more I read about Stallman the more I find that his extreme stance is just who he is:

"He's entirely consistent and uncompromising and I think the world needs someone like that," Perens said.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/open_source/sho...

Consistency in itself is not much of a virtue.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

-Emerson

Emerson is talking about people that are consistent for fear of admitting they were wrong. I don't think Stallman's consistency is that kind...

I'm glad he exists, though, because he makes me look like a moderate, even though I'm a pretty dedicated free software fan.

That's the Overton window and I'm glad he's pushing it.

Without him, we may still be in the world of non-disclosure agreements and closed Unices.

"The most momentous product of Stallman's genius, Linux, was the first operating system to feature software that was entirely free."

I believe this is not entirely accurate - I seem to remember someone else being involved in creating linux...

Well, that someone used GCC and the first thing they ran on their new kernel was Bash ;-)

:-) It's curious that nobody seems to remember that "that someone" ported GCC to x86.

That credit is probably due to William Schelter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Schelter

Obviously this sentence is... flawed. But the most important lesson here is: Every sentence of the form "X invented Y" suffers from the same flaw.

Consider "X invented the television": One canonical value of X is "Vladimir Zworykin", but maverick outsiders have a hero in Philo Farnsworth, and every Scot knows that the correct answer is "John Logie Baird". And all of them are right, in one way or another.

Or the sentence "X invented the first antibiotic": is the correct value of X "Sir Alexander Fleming", "John Tyndall", or "molds in the Penicillium family"? (And why didn't the Penicillium get knighted as well? It did all the grunt work!)

For the really strong form of this argument, google "James Burke connections".

Can anyone answer for me how Stallman has influenced the Cambridge tech community? What was interesting, as the author envisons "Mt. Hackmore", is that Stallman is the only East Coaster in that circle. Makes me think that in combining his personality and ethos with the venture community in Boston you could perhaps explain the very conservative investment environment.

Stallman got trolled (though he realized it) when Philip Greenspun did a parody page on "Heather Has Two Mommies and they go to the Zoo" : http://philip.greenspun.com/zoo/

Stallman's PC response, laying all on the "right wing Christian movement": http://philip.greenspun.com/zoo/stallman-reaction.text

I understand why Stallman wants the GNU in GNU/Linux. But what's always confusing me is - why the slash? He's a programmer, so he knows that this is usually used for paths. But that does not seem to make sense if he wants this as a single name which should always be used. You can't create a single GNU/Linux folder - at least not in GNU/Linux. So anyone know why he didn't use another character there?

Probably because GNU Linux without slash would mean there may be another Linux also that's not GNU.

And yes, GNU/Linux reads like a path: here is the GNU world and here's Linux subworld.

> .. there may be another Linux also that's not GNU

Technically there may be one. While the history of Hurd shows that the opposite is not quite true. So all things considered it should really be Linux/GNU :-)

There are distros with BSD or Solaris kernels and a GNU userland.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#whyslash

We're talking about a version of GNU, the operating system, distinguished by having Linux as the kernel. A slash fits the situation because it means “combination.” (Think of “Input/Output”.) This system is the combination of GNU and Linux; hence, “GNU/Linux”.

There are other ways to express “combination”. If you think that a plus-sign is clearer, please use that. In French, a hyphen is clear: “GNU-Linux”. In Spanish, we sometimes say “GNU con Linux”.

Stallman detests wealth

He travels the world as a free software evangelist

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Does he detest wealth because he is a free software evangelist?

Or is he a free software evangelist because he never figured out how to become wealthy himself?

He was successfully charging $250/hour as a software consultant prior to taking up his "evangelist" role full-time. I think he could be quite wealthy if he were to attempt to be.

Stallman is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, that's a cool $1M.

haha...RMS didn't post that ad for himself on craigslist, I posted it on his behalf! It's so strange to see oneself indirectly referred to in an article which one otherwise has nothing to do with.

He's taking credit for Linux now? wtf?

I believe his argument is that just about everything outside the kernel came from the FSF. It's not entirely implausible but he is obnoxious about it.

Apparently just insisting that it be called "GNU/Linux" wasn't too successful.

gcc was an important piece of work that Stallman started. The rest of the GNU stuff was a bunch of knock-off code because the original code was bound up in lawsuits (just like the kernel) or later replicated because of licensing purity of essence concerns. Writing a second verson of tar, cpio, cron, etc. hardly counts as a great piece of innovation, and Stallman is kind of a git for acting like it is. The thing about Linux is that Torvalds just went ahead and wrote it, rather than wanking about it for years and years like Stallman did.

I guess if GNU had actually produced HURD back in the day Linux would be forgotten or never have happened, but what's done is done now.

Man, BSD conquers the desktop and it still can't get no respect.

(Of course, its non-free "Mac OS X" disguise does fool a lot of people.)

What I'm trying to say, of course, is that there's no reason why multiple takes on the Unix kernel can't live happily next to each other in the marketplace. Also, you can't just blame Linux for stealing potential mindshare from the HURD... it was a group effort. There was also FreeBSD, as well as non-free but well-respected options like Solaris.

Well, kinda sorta. Why, for example, didn't Oracle choose FreeBSD as their preferred platform? They've gone with Red Hat, and include a long-ish list of stuff that you have to install on top of RHEL to get their software to work. It's crazy really. As in, one of their premier platform simply doesn't work out of the box. Solaris, Windows, you name it, you just install and go, but RHEL is a complete pain in the arse.

So, why? 'Cos Linux has the mindshare, and it got the mindshare because it has legions of activists (e.g. Slashdot) with nothing better to do than repeat the message to anyone who will listen. Linux hoovered up basically all the non-geek consciousness of free Unix, which means you show up to work and the company has already bought a squillion RHEL licenses and can't understand why all the engineers are slack-jawed with horror...

Tell me about it RHEL is a pain in the butt. I much prefer Suse (SLE) from a usability standpoint. I think the reason BSD isn't more popular though for example with Oracle is because there is no company that sells BSD as a business platform and is as well known as RH. Sure it's a major part of OSX but not many people use OSX as a server.

There did used to be a company called BSDI that sold BSD/386, I wonder whatever happened to them. Way back in the day, Oracle had a project called Raw Iron in which they planned to sell boxes as dedicated Oracle appliances, they used FreeBSD for that, so somewhere within the company they do acknowledge that it's the best of the free Unixes (for their app).

My cow-orkers and I all run OSX, FreeBSD, Debian/Ubuntu on our own kit... No-one I know uses Red Hat by choice. I'd love to deploy XServes at work, but again, it's a mindshare problem... Dells running Red Hat, yuck.

BSDi merged with Walnut Creek, then sold its software operations off to Wind River in 2001. That was a bit of a rocky period for FreeBSD releases, if memory serves, since a good chunk of core had worked for Walnut Creek before the merger...

Of course he isn't. The author of the article made that claim, and the claim is in error.

From the article:

"In 1991, all that was left was the kernel, the brain within the brain of the computer, and thus the most essential component of any operating system, and the hardest part to create. Before Stallman could finish building his, an ingenious young Finnish computer scientist named Linus Torvalds—who was initially inspired by a Stallman speech at the Polytechnic University in Helsinki the year before—played off a Unix-like operating system called Minix to develop a free software system of his own. Incomplete in other respects, it had the kernel that Stallman's lacked—one that meshed so beautifully with the GNU system that it seemed destined for it. Strictly speaking, the complete operating system should have been called GNU/Linux, representing the combined contributions of Stallman and Torvalds. Stallman always insists on the term, pronouncing it "GNU slash Linux." But in the popular mind, it came to be known as only Linux. Stallman has never gotten over that."

"When I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix"!"

-rms

why doesn't he call it "ginix"?

or ginix"?

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