[weavejester]

Often it's the people that refuse to compromise that make the world a better place. Do you think Martin Luther King should have compromised on his vision of racial equality?

Whilst the civil rights movement is obviously far more important than the free software movement, the idea that ideals should not be compromised is at the core of both. Unlike, say, the BSD license, the GPL is a license that allows for no compromise. If you want to distribute modifications, you must also distribute the source. It's this ideology that made the more pragmatic open-source movement possible in the first place.

[axod]

How is Richard Stallman refusing to use a webbrowser making the world a better place? :/ It's just taking ideals to extremes for the sake of it.

[weavejester]

As far as I'm aware, Stallman isn't refusing to use a web browser for ideological reasons. It's because: "Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection."

Besides, I seem to recall he uses Emacs/W3 for viewing web pages (offline, downloaded via wget).

[axod]

>> "To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me."

You have to admit that sounds slightly quirky? I assumed it was an attempt to maintain that his personal PC is free from any closed source software, since it's not even rendering websites, it's just receiving email.

Sorry, but to me it sounds like either someone who is so into ideals that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face, or someone who has simply failed to keep up with changes in technology.

[ptomato]

No, I'm pretty sure that is an attempt to remain mostly-distraction free and not waste time on the internet. There are (several) entirely open source/free browsers he would use if that was the issue.

[axod]

The internet does have some useful productive things on it as well as time wasting devices :/

For a start it's pretty useful for documentation.

[bingaman]

That's what wget -r is for.

Pretty sure Stallman isn't going to show up in this thread ;)

[dagw]

According to the interview he only has an internet connection two or three times a day at most. In that sort of scenario his set up kind of makes sense. If I only had short bursts of internet connections during the day I'd probably also set up a system where I could queue up URLs to be automatically downloaded for offline reading next time I had a connection.

[elblanco]

You're missing the point. why does he have such limited connectivity?

[dagw]

Whatever the reason I doubt it has anything to do with closed software or his free software philosophy. There are plenty of completely Free ways to get online. Perhaps he lives in a place where you can't get broadband, and only bothers to dial up a couple of times a day. Or perhaps he simply doesn't want a permanent Internet connection because he doesn't feel a need for it.

Actually there have been at least a couple of threads about working without internet on a some of the RV/nomad threads here, and based on those I'm considering trying pulling the plug on my internet connection for 4 hours at a time when working to see what it will do be my ability to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted by hacker news. Perhaps Stallman has a similar approach.

[rbanffy]

When I have a tight deadline, blocking Google Reader, HN and Slashdot increases my productivity by a couple orders of magnitude.

[elblanco]

> Most of the time I do not have an Internet connection.

He should get it then and join us all in the 21st century.

[notauser]

Because there are (a lot of) people on the close-everything side of the debate it's essential to have at least a few people arguing that everything is opened so that the eventual compromise is somewhere in the middle.

[elblanco]

I refuse to call it GNU/Linux. By pure lines of source it should be called X.org/Linux.

[nzmsv]

Why X.org? Even if you ignore the fact that it is an XFree86 fork, there are plenty of Linux systems with no X at all. In fact, that would be most of them, since there are certainly more Linux servers than desktops out there. Now add the embedded systems, and desktop installs are a drop in the bucket. Also, a number of GNU tools predate the Linux kernel.

[elblanco]

Apparently HN is refusing to let me reply to you. So I'm doing it here.

The point of saying X.org/Linux is that I could form some ridiculous argument that would require a completely different naming convention. Why don't we call all cars Benz/Cars since Karl Benz holds much of the work that makes cars go? Or all helicopters Da Vinci/Helicopters? Because it's silliness.

Calling something GNU/Linux is silly nonsense RMS designed so he could get his beard stroked. If you notice he's never suggested the following:

-Linux (powered by GNU)

-Linux-GNU

-Linux/GNU

-Linux - With GNU utilities

-Linux - powered by GNU and Xfree86/X.org and the Mozilla foundation.

-Linux/GNU/Xfree86|X.org/Mozilla

- etc.

He's suggested only GNU/Linux. Notice GNU is in front (to remind us all how wonderful GNU is) and the '/' indicates it's interchangeable. Like "do you want ham and/or cheese on your sandwich?". Only GNU != Linux, the two are not interchangeable. The GNU Hurd is a failure. But I bet I could cobble together a GNU free Linux distro for the most part today, even rewriting most of the utilities in a couple weeks, and probably completely in a couple of years once LLVM gets up and going.

He wanted to co-opt the relative success that Linux became by formulating an argument such that the only resolution in his mind was to call it GNU/Linux. And instead of building his own system, he built a bunch of the crap for a completed system, then spent the rest of his years dwelling in Emacs and emailing himself wget harvests of websites because for "personal reasons".

Really, outside of maybe the compiler toolchain (which is looking to have a short lifespan in the face of LLVM and associated front ends like Clang, are any of the utilities that hard to replicate? (quick answer no, I had to build most of the GNU toolkit from scratch for a single OS course assignment in my undergrad, including a shell, everybody had to do that, it's pretty easy). I'm sorry, but a few dozen utilities like 'ls' and 'cat' don't allow somebody to co-opt somebody else's hard work.

[rbanffy]

Actually it makes perfect sense. Most Linux systems are a collection of GNU tools on top of the Linux kernel. This "bunch of crap" forms the basis of a lot of internet infrastructure you take for granted. Also, saying the GNU compilers have a short lifespan is, well... Perhaps they do, in geological terms. Seriously, GCC existed since like ever.

My personal setup could be called Gnome/Xorg/GNU/Linux, but if people complain about GNU/Linux I guess my letter soup won't fly. Debian is packaging something that is called GNU/kFreeBSD, a GNU userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel. Nexenta could be called GNU/OpenSolaris (in fact, there are lots of GNU tools in OpenSolaris right now).

Operating systems, from kernel to shell, are usually conceptually very simple, with tons of hard work on top of simple concepts. This simplicity, specially in the case of Unix, allowed it to be continuously reinvented for 40 years in a way it's still a modern OS. I really wish we had HAL/OS (maybe Microsoft can expand the Milo and Kate demo into one) and full-blown human-level AI agents, but the world didn't take any turn into that direction. Unix, in its many incarnations, is still the OS to imitate. And the GNU tools, be it on top of a BSD/Mach kernel (as in OSX) or the Linux kernel is more or less what comes to mind when someone says "Unix".

That is quite an impressive accomplishment.

[elblanco]

> Seriously, GCC existed since like ever

Absolutely, I remember using the GCC tools way back when. Not disputing that. But there are certainly older (and arguably better) compilers. And there will be newer ones (like the upcoming LLVM setup). GCC does not hold a monopoly on converting and optimizing high-level language constructs into localized machine code.

> My personal setup could be called Gnome/Xorg/GNU/Linux

Which is fine. Either call it "Linux" or call it a string of alphabet soup if you like.

My problem with RMS is his insistence on only GNU/Linux. Which is absolutely disrespectful to the hard work Linus and others put into the Kernel, which RMS and the GNU foundation was unable to accomplish, and to the folks who've written numerous other things that are the bread and butter of what many people think Linux boxen are for - like the Apache Foundation or XFree86/X.org or the KDE folks or Sun or the various thousands of volunteers that have toiled away writing drivers or firmware or whatever...It's a great exemplar of near infinite hubris to insist it be "GNU" (first) / Linux.

From wikipedia (and I've seen similar quote from him over the years) "Stallman argues that not using "GNU" in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project..."

It's unfortunate that he doesn't understand co-opting the work of others under your own umbrella is what's disparaging the GNU project's name. I don't think anybody who is marginally familiar with the topic thinks that the GNU foundation isn't an important thing. But do I have to stick GNU on the front of anything I build out of GNU stuff? What if I decide to write a cookbook about French Cooking? Do I have to call it the "Houghton Mifflin/French Tarts for Tarty People" since Houghton Mifflin published Julia Child's books which I used to learn the French culinary arts?

That's silliness.

Linus happily acknowledges the role the Foundation has played, with very little prompting. The credit is already being granted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ugRM3-twc

But he also says

"Well, I think it's justified, but it's justified if you actually make a GNU distribution of Linux ... the same way that I think that "Red Hat Linux" is fine, or "SuSE Linux" or "Debian Linux", because if you actually make your own distribution of Linux, you get to name the thing, but calling Linux in general "GNU Linux" I think is just ridiculous."

And this same feeling is voiced by others like Jim Gettys

"There are lots of people on this bus; I don't hear a clamor of support that GNU is more essential than many of the other components; can't take a wheel away, and end up with a functional vehicle, or an engine, or the seats. I recommend you be happy we have a bus."

and other unhappy voices in the community including Eric S. Raymond,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

It all boils down to sour grapes which the Linux Journal correctly identified in this single summary statement

"Linus got the glory for what [Stallman] wanted to do."