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

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 06 August 2002 10:24 am, lembark at wrkhors.com wrote:
> > 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.

Yes, but I think an un-bending Stallman is what Linux needs. He's the one who 
keeps us honest when it would be easier to trade a little freedom for 
expediency.

If every Linux advocate were equally unbending, we'd never get anywhere. But 
RMS acts as a check and balance, and is one of our best guarantees that our 
favorite OS will always remain free (speech). I'm really glad Stallman's 
there to remind us that's EXACTLY what we're doing. Sure, sometimes every one 
of us trades freedom for expediency.

SteveT