Hacker News Reader

Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

You're right--Gore started the job of devaluing the prizes, now we just have to give one to Stallman and nobody will ever care about the Nobel Prize again.

View on HN

Without RMS there might not be a GPL nor Linux licensed under the GPL. There would probably be no open source movement either because it relies on free software.

So you can stop with the insults now.

The thing is there are a lot of GPL-like licenses. Linux might have ended up under a BSD-style license rather than a GPL license. While things certainly would have been different, I'm not convinced they would have been worse.

The assertion that there would be no open source movement without RMS is a bit difficult to believe, unless we are going for a very narrow definition of open source.

Linux under BSDL? We already know how that would end. We'd lose half a generation's best work because it's trapped in the wreckage of vendors' failed proprietary forks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

Your argument makes the unfounded assumption that those vendors would have done the work you "lost" if the code had been GPL licensed.

As a counterpoint, FreeBSD has progressed at a steady clip -- I fail to see how it is significantly behind Linux, and is significantly ahead in many areas.

It falls behind by not being as popular. I think this is not a result of BSD being inferior, it's just how things came into being. I don't have numbers on BSD developers or the rate of improvement, but I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

... I guess one reason for it is that BSD license put off more developers compared to GPLv2.

No, it was just timing. The AT&T lawsuit cast a palor on the BSDs just when Linux started hitting its stride. By the time the lawsuit was settled, Linux had dominant mindshare.

Same reason why MySQL is popular -- PHP gave it the mindshare. Same reason why PHP is popular -- it was one of the few options available at the time, and by the time better things came along, it was already firmly rooted.

So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD? And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),

The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.

What's the benefit? The users are still running proprietary software, and the vendor is still confined to the same 10% or so of the computer market.

It shows almost no success because the code that makes MacOS X and Windows what they are is still proprietary. Having a UNIX shell in MacOS X might be nice, but that's only one part of the system.

I do assume that. Linux rapidly caught up with the BSDs despite their huge head start, which demonstrates the industry does have a critical mass of developers who are willing to contribute their work rather than go through the pain of tivoization or building from scratch.

So, its my understanding, that this wasn't do the GPL versus the BSD license, but had more to do with the uncertainty hanging over the BSD distributions due to a lawsuit threat from proprietary Unix.

Now of course I could be wrong, but I think there may be other factors which could explain the difference.

Open source has long existed and thrived without RMS and the GPL.

Without RMS there might not be a GPL nor Linux licensed under the GPL. There would probably be no open source movement either because it relies on free software.

Yeah, but RMS doesn't shower as much as I think he should, so clearly he is not worthy of recognition for his work. GNU, Emacs, gcc, the Free Software Foundation... even a plant could have made all those. But showering... there's something that makes you truly elite...

</sarcasm>

> Gore started the job of devaluing the prizes

cough cough Henry Kissinger.

People began laughing when they didn't award Gandhi, and haven't really stopped since.

The prize committee did declare that there was "no suitable living candidate" the year after Gandhi died.

That was after they had refused to give him the award for a few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com