Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU.

Sep 27, 2014 16:51

This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible to name a publicly traded company that has not ( Read more... )

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ext_2794450 September 28 2014, 13:06:04 UTC
I agree: leave RMS alone, bugs happen, we fix them and move on.

However, I also strongly disagree with your view on his importance. The GPLv2 is a nice license, and we should thank him for getting that started, but it seems very naive to think that no one else would have done something similar in his absence. Be that as it may, cheers to RMS for the GPLv2!

When it comes to actual, real, useable code, his contributions have been much more modest (there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of open source developers who have contributed things of greater importance and utility). A few of the projects under the GNU umbrella are crucial still (noteably GCC and glibc, though the former probably less and less so), however, RMS is not contributing meaningfully to these any longer (for a very long time) and the fact that these are at all associated with GNU is mostly historical accidents (there are plenty of important contributors to both who strongly oppose RMS/FSF/GNU).

Within a standard Linux [0] distribution, the GNU project is far from being the most significant, and within the GNU project RMS is far from being the most significant (code-wise), so let's stop the worship of this power-hungry egomaniac. Salute him for his contributions, but admit that he, like the rest of us, is just one among many, who does not deserve any special god-like status, and the fact that he is demanding this status reduces him to nothing more than a clown.

[0]: Yeah, not GNU/Linux. The idea that anyone can dictate the language we should use, to the extent of trying to force groups of people to change how they refer to themselves shows how completely removed from reality these clowns are. Case in point, I am involved with the distribution "Arch Linux", which is the name wo chose for ourselves. We could have chosen anything, including "Arch GNU", "Arch GNU/Linux", "Arch Software Collection", or anything else, but for whatever reason we chose "Arch Linux". No offence intended. I noticed on the FSF website that they referred to us as "Arch GNU/Linux", so I dropped them an email very politely informing them about the mistake. I receieved an arrogant and absurd answer telling me that we had "made a mistake" in chosing our name, and they were simply correcting our mistake.

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ext_2794450 September 28 2014, 16:33:57 UTC
Hey Tom ,

Pardon the language deficiencies . English is not my native tongue .

Your rant is out of place and badly timed . This is a time where freesoftware community should be united . I am glad they have made themselves arrogant against you .

It is not anybody's concern what he is contributing NOW . rms has started the whole "free"software movement . Without that , even if he's still contributing today , would not have been beneficial to the whole IT community .

GNU project certainly is significant , since "Linux" is a kernel . Too bad Torvalds hasn't invented the GNU stuff he has embedded his kernel with . I pity those who can't give way and give credit to the organization that certainly has earned it .

So people at GNU has every right to let you know that it should be GNU/Linux . You are more arrogant , than you being informed that Arch has made a mistake . Because Arch really has mad a mistake .

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