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Comment by mghackerlady | Hacker News Reader

To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way

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Care to explain?

Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.

> outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.

Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.

That said the previous post.

>> remained in the domain of universities and industry

> I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.

Was the source available, and possible to modify it?

Sure it was free (as in beer) but was it free (as in speech?) Could you modify and improve the compiler? If you did, could you redistribute it? Knowing bell labs, the answer is a definite no to the last one

Provided to whom ?

Most of that stuff was made available to universities and colleges as institutions, but not to individual students. Once you graduate, you have no effective (or legal) access to it anymore ...

Even after Sun got a C++ compiler for free for internal use (but not by their customers) by jumping into bed with AT&T, they still hired Michael Tiemann of Cygnus Support to port G++ to Solaris.

Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the World Wide Web to make it a freely available technology, so without stallman the net would be vastly different, likely staying fragmented between different protocols like it used to be. Plus, the operating system you're using likely has some GNU stuff in it somewhere

Most of that is incorrect and revisionist history. The Web was developed on a commercial system (the NExT from Steve Job’s company) and initial implementations were made on various commercial systems by differing groups. Even today, Linux is at most 50% of the web servers on the Internet.

It was developed on a proprietary system (free software can be commercial) and yes, various implementations were made on said proprietary systems, but there were always free ones like lynx (the oldest browser still in development). Plus, Tim Berners-Lee was likely inspired by the GNU and BSD projects when he made the protocol royalty free

It's not revisionist. The entire NeXT codebase was literally compiled with GCC.

There's even a funny story in there about how NeXT almost bypassed the GPL until GNU got Lawyers involved since them using a loophole would be very bad for peoples freedom

Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances

> Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances

I wanted to comment on this. Please correct me if I am wrong as I used LLM sources to find

So from what I can find (from human searches) was that https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-web-server-market-... Linux is indeed ~55%

But the other thing is that some servers (from Chatgpt, I am not gonna lie) it says that there's an Unknown/CDN servers around 20 or more% (I feel like its more) to then reach the ~88% data estimate in some sense.

So can someone please clarify me on this if this is the true case or not?

You used to have to pay for UNIX just like you pay for Microsoft Windows

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