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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

"Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you're less motivated to do the hard work needed."

That's not to say Stallman didn't do any work, but I'm wondering if this observation applies here.

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Considering that the same guy then went on to write both emacs and gcc1 from scratch, mostly unassisted, seems to argue against the theory.

What I find interesting about RMS isn't that his productivity was suspect, but frankly that it just ended in the late 80's. He still writes code, surely, but there's a big wall in his history where he just decided that the code was there and what the world needed was moral evangelism. That's a fairly alien attitude to most of us, I suspect. I certainly could never have been happy with a pivot like that.

More generally the idea that the FSF was just lolling about not getting anything done until Linux landed in their lap is a weird modern fantasy. And ironically it's exactly the kind of thing they tried to treat by publicizing (or "stealing" if you swing that way) the "Linux" brand with the "lignux"/"GNU/Linux" nonsense. They wrote a ton of working code, most of which we're still using today. What they didn't write was Linux.

Oh please don't get me wrong, Stallman's contributions are immense and shouldn't be ignored.

Was the problem just in the different approaches between Stallman and Torvalds? That being: Stallman wanted to create GNU from the outside in (editors, then tools, then compilers, then the kernel) whereas Torvalds went inside-out?

I think it boils down to two differences in approach: 1) Linus was more radically open about including others in development of the kernel, and 2) Linus was more focused on "working" than "right" in kernel design. These happened to combine beautifully, as a working kernel meant people using the system and wanting to make it better.

Linus also benefited tremendously from having the GNU toolchain and userspace already available.

There's also the more obvious difference in design. Hurd was supposed to be a micro-kernel whereas Linux was a much more straight forward monolithic kernel. One requires the inter-operation of lots of systems whereas one is just one big system that can just keep track of everything inside instead.

I'm pretty sure no one could build a functioning micro-kernel that'd be useful and able to compete at the time the Hurd project was still relevant. Then again, maybe I'm just making excuses for the FSF.

Well, that's more or less what I'd meant by 'focused on "working" rather than "right"' - GNU was trying to do what theoreticians suggested made the most sense; Linus was trying to do what had worked before. Both have pros and cons, but the latter is "safer" and certainly seems to have paid off here.

Linus also had the internet. Look at rms' signature - UUCP, ARPAnet. The internet, usenet and the patch program made collaboration much easier.

True, though while RMS did not have these things when he started, he presumably did before Linus started.

Ah, yes he did, except he was obstinate about using anything more fancy than email. As I remember it, though, there were a lot of ports of the GNU tools to all the unices, and the PC was still not as good as the Unix workstations. So where's the motivation to make Hurd, you know?

People weren't really clamoring for Hurd or a kernel for GNU, because they got an OS with their computer, and got the GNU tools and libc. The really major geeks would buy old, used workstations, which were built like tanks and were plenty fast for running single-user unix.

>Stallman wanted to create GNU from the outside in (editors, then tools, then compilers, then the kernel) whereas Torvalds went inside-out?

A new editor or a new command-line tool was immediately useful to a user of a proprietary Unix.

In contrast, a new kernel would not have been useful to the user of a proprietary application or a proprietary command-line tool unless perhaps pains were taken to give the new kernel binary compatibility with proprietary kernels -- and even then there would have been worries about whether the user had the legal right to run the proprietary tool on the new kernel.

In summary, the order in which Stallman chose to build the pieces was the order that grew the user base the fastest, which in turn grew contributions from developers the fastest, in a virtuous cycle.

Grew the user base of portions of the GNU system the fastest, yes, and was arguably a correct choice for his aims. A number of things contributed to a faster rise of use of Linux compared to Hurd - which then saw the same virtuous cycle.

I think part of the difference in approach can be explained by the arrival of the 386 processor. At the time Stallman makes his announcement he needs Unix workstation vendors to donate their proprietary hardware for him to work on, because at that time that was the only way to get a running Unix environment. By the time Torvalds makes his announcement you've got 386 processors widely available, plus Minix as a viable and cheap (but not free in either sense) alternative to Unix running on top of it.

In some ways you could argue Stallman's approach was disrupted by the arrival of cheaper commodity hardware.

"then went on to write both emacs and gcc1 from scratch"

This has the timeline wrong, for emacs.

GNU emacs was begun after the 1983 announcement I believe. The first release was in late 1984. It's true that "emacs" the editor idiom had existed for years, but GNU Emacs the software was begun under the auspices of the FSF and written mostly/entirely in its early days by RMS.

In this announcement:

  Who Am I?
  
  I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much imitated EMACS
  editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. ...

Right, but almost no one uses the Emacs or the imitations being referred to here: almost everyone uses the Emacs Stallman released after this 1983 announcement.

EMACS (as mentioned in the announcement) does not refer to GNU Emacs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#GNU_Emacs

EMACS was originally some Editing MACroS that ran on top of an editor called TECO[1] which was also from MIT.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Editor_and_Corrector

actually, the core of GNU emacs was Gosmacs, until Unipress decided they didn't like that.

http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/01/06/163248/richard-s...

"The last piece of Gosmacs code that I replaced was the serial terminal scrolling optimizer, a few pages of Gosling's code which was proceeded by a comment with a skull and crossbones, ... "

Fair enough.

neither gcc nor emacs was written "from scratch", though the borrowed parts of both were eventually re-written.

Actually, he had already written Emacs at that point.

What I find interesting about RMS isn't that his productivity was suspect, but frankly that it just ended in the late 80's.

IIRC, RMS had developed pretty severe wrist pain by then, and was forced to dictate his code to assistants. Well, you can imagine how that went.

The GNU utilties, clib, gcc, all that stuff was just spinning out into the PC world. The software was being ported to everything from Amigas and Ataris with no MMU, and sometimes no hard drive, to Sun workstations. I thought it was pretty amazing - that a lot of hobbyists like me were turning our personal computers into little unix-like machines.

GNU was like this sun, and we were starting to move toward it. It was like we were sunflowers looking for sun... and then meteors being pulled by gravity.

For some people, the FSF and GNU project were more important than DOS or the Mac.

Side note: It turns actually out that if you announce how to achieve that goal, you're more likely to achieve it. Announcing without a plan is reducing the likelihood.

Sorry, no cite handy right now :(

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