Hacker News Reader

Comment by demetris | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the name of Linus Torvalds is not in the list of previous winners.

Somewhat related: when the Linus Torvalds award was given to the FSF, Stallman responded with something along the lines of "Giving the Linus Torvalds award to the FSF is like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Alliance".

But who wouldn't be happy to get a Han Solo award?

I think Han Solo is a pretty cool guy. Eh shoots Greedos and doesnt afraid of anything

According to the announcement of the 1998 Free Software Award:

    People such as Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, 
    who have already received other awards for their 
    contributions, were not eligible for the Free 
    Software Award.

Source: http://www.gnu.org/award/award-1998.html

Aha! Thank you.

Not really. Linus isn't a Free Software zealot in the way that the FSF is. He's too pragmatic for that.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really? Linus isn't a Free Software advocate in the way that the FSF wants their people to be. He's a serious open source and GPLv2 advocate, but that's where it stops. He is not the kind of person that the FSF would give this award to.

(in case you don't know) I think the downvotes will be for the implication of the FSF being unpragmatic zealots. Obviously many don't share this view.

If they don’t share that view, I think they fail to understand what the FSF is all about.

I’m fairly certain RMS itself would agree that the ideal of freedom they fight and advocate for is to be followed without compromising to practical inconveniences.

One acronym ... LGPL

Just because you don't see the conveniences in having a full Free Software stack doesn't mean they don't exist.

What? Of course there are. That is not what I meant. If you choose to use a full Free Software stack, you'll have to face some inconveniences: fewer hardware choices, different or unavailable software and codecs, etc.

Easy examples: if you choose to run a completely free system most of the videos on the web today are unavailable to you (even counting the few YouTube converted to WebM), as are essentially all games on any platform. Also, you cannot have a smartphone (I think even OpenMoko needs a binary blob). These are inconveniences.

RMS thinks freedom has higher value than having the ability to choose whatever hardware you want, so he picked the only laptop available with free firmware.

Matz isn't a zealot either, so your argument is obviously flawed.

I think there's a simple reason... Have you seen how upset RMS gets when you call a distribution a "Linux Distribution" instead of a "GNU/Linux Distribution"? :P

* Sent from my laptop, running a Linux Distribution

Reply on news.ycombinator.com