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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Most people don't have 10 years of uninterrupted time to spend on an art project. Most of those who do choose to spend that time on something other than writing a compiler and OS.

EDIT: to be clear, that doesn't mean it's not impressive or not a great achievement. It's a fantastic piece of art IMO.

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This is why I think Richard Stallman had some success. His living requirement where so low that for most of the 1980's/early 90's, he only had to work 6 weeks to make all the money he needed for that year.

It opened him up to work on building/promoting GNU and FSF.

I have said for years that things like Free software would have come along eventually, he just happened to be in the right position to make it happen when it did.

And because he built actually useful things.

I never worked with Solaris and the like, but it's my understanding the GNU tools were useful enough that they got routinely installed on the commercial unixes before Linux came along.

This is sadly something that seems to be getting lost. GNU tooling doesn't seem that competitive anymore, and the trend is to write newer, fancier replacements, like ripgrep for example.

Absolutely, it is kind of the badge of an operating system that if it can run the GNU tool chain - it is a complete operating system.

I am still 100% on board with the libre/freedom stuff but you are right, a lot of the GNU stuff is being over run by more nimble newer things. A part of that is probably in part due to the technical legacy of some of the GNU tools having code dating back to the 1970's.

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