[LUNI] Origin of "GNU/Linux" revealed at last!

[lembark at wrkhors.com]

> Until I went and actually heard RMS speak about that particular topic.  His 
> arguments and reasoning are rational, sound, reasonably, and for the most 
> part quite ultaristic.  He wants to be sure the message of Freedom gets out, 
> and that concerns him far more than his group actually getting credit for all 
> the code they wrote (though it does make up more than 90% of the core 
> operating system code, so some credit is deserved I think).
> 
> He is often characterized by his detractors and ranting and raving, but all
> of  the .ogg and .mp3 recordings of all of his speeches, all of the video of
> his  speeches, and the speech I saw in person show a very different person.
> One  who is reasonable, calm, thoughtful, and almost diffident despite his 
> stubborn refusal to back down on issues he has taken a moral or ethical 
> stance on.
<snip>

His main fault is his main virtue: the man is unbending in 
his beliefs. This is what pushed the GNU project to where it
is today and formed the backbone of open source; it also 
makes RMS a real pain to deal with in situations where bending
ever-so-little-much might acutually help his cause. 

For most of OS history his rock-solid view of things carried
the whole process forward. At this point there is a real 
question about whether "mostly-open" source will be a better
approach to getting things done (e.g., running proprietary 
code on linux). At that point un-bending is not what commercial
vendors testing the waters want to know about. 

Time alone will tell if RMS manages to sideline himself as
the industury moves to some sort of mixed-mode. If "free beer"
works and he doesn't bend then he'll be known as the person
who got it all started; if he manages to bend a bit then he
may be the best one to keep it moving forward.

--
Steven Lembark                              2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                      Chicago, IL 60647
                                           +1 800 762 1582