I hate it when I realize how long I've been doing this ... I can remember reading RMS's original DDJ article in 1984 while stuck in traffic headed to the airport and thinking the guys was off his rocker. It wasn't the whole free software thing because that was well underway with the public domain stuff that offered at least reduced versions of unix utilities, editors, small-C, etc. that ran under CP/M and PC-DOS. It was the idea that the intellectual property underlying the software would eventually be freely available and we'd have to make a living off of providing services that had everyone in the car in stitches. Thirty years later it pretty clear that he was right. BTW, in 1990 he was awarded a $240,000 MacArthur Fellowship for that work and in 2001 he was awarded the Takeda prize, and another $250,000, in recognition of his efforts. A MacArthur Fellow doesn't need GNU slapped on Linux for personal aggrandizement, although he might want to do it to recognize the effort of all of the people who devoted their free time to producing things like gcc that made Linux possible. Then in the early '90's he moved on to the anti-competitive effects of software patents. Again a lot of people figured him for being a wing nut, and again I think his concerns turned out to be well grounded. Linux is an impressive engineering/management accomplishment, but please don't confuse it with an intellectual movement. --rick Munir Nassar wrote: > markring40 at ippimail.com wrote: >> Then a sys admin for a local, South Dakota ISP gave me (years ago) his >> Slackware 7.0 CD's. That is the distro that I learned the most from. It >> has good documentation and it's own package utility. >> http://www.slackware.com/ >> >> By the way, the Slackware Kernel was written by a one-time student of >> Moorhead State (Patrick Volkerding), where my son starts on Monday! > > I think it is time for another quick primer and history: > > kernel: this is the core of the operating system, the most basic program > that runs the hardware. This is what drivers plug into to make your > whizbang hardware able to whizbang. Under Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and > all other Linux distributions this kernel is called Linux. under windows > it is called NTKRNL.EXE, under dos it is msdos.sys(sorta). > > Distribution: In the olden days Linux was a complete distribution onto > itself, Linus Torvalds released it to replace minix on your computer so > it included gcc, getty, bash and a kernel(no name for the kernel at the > time); nowadays Linux is just the kernel and other people such as Pat > Volkerding put this kernel along with many other software packages onto > media to make a distributibution. Distributions usually include the > software that talks to the hardware via the drivers to make the whizbang > hardware actually do its whizbanging. Many of the basic application in a > distribution come from a project by Richard Stallman(rms) called GNU. > His idea was to make a OS to replace Unix(or minix as the case may be) > the only problem was that they never got around to actually writing a > kernel, last i heard they are still working on it 20 years later. > > If you are not confused yet, rms wants you to call every linux > distribution GNU/Linux because the majority of code in a distribution > was writted for GNU. > > I know i an opening a can of worms here but these are things that people > need to know about so that they do not go around saying stuff like: the > Slackware Kernel was written by Patrick Volkerding. Because that just > makes you look like an idiot. > > I have tried to be objective in my above descriptions, but i also need > to be subjective to keep my sanity. Stop reading if you do not care > about my opinions. Personally i think rms needs to smoke less, if he > wanted recognition he should have written it into his license; oh wait > he does get get plenty enough recognition as it is because of his > license(who does not know the GNU GPL?). I think he is just miffed that > some 20year old Finnish college student was able to release his GNU > system before he was and got all his glory, the this student did not > even make it to MIT, to add insult to injury this system now is not > known as GNU as it was supposed to, but linux after this upstart kid. > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list