"The following is a transcript of a lecture given by Richard Stallman in Zagreb (Croatia/Hrvatska) on March 9th 2006. The lecture was given in English. Richard Stallman launched the GNU project in 1983, and with it the Free Software movement. Stallman is the president of FSF - a sister organisation of FSFE. Transcription of this presentation was undertaken by Ciarán O'Riordan."
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Member since:2006-01-01
We certainly wouldn't have nividia drivers or decent wireless support under Gnu.
That's not true. X.org includes an open&free nvidia driver, it just doesn't support 3D acceleration. And now there's a project, called Nouveau, working on a free nvidia driver that should add 3D support sometime in the future.
You also mention that "RMS is very staunch in his views while Linus tends to be more practical." I beg to disagree. The Linux kernel would now be dead and forgotten if there wasn't the pragmatic GPL to protect it. The BitKeeper incident showed that Linus is willing to make compromises and to idealistically believe that people are always nice and things will turn out all right. But Linus got bitten in the ass by the proprietary software that he used. RMS is much too pragmatic to make a similar mistake.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/05/02/18OPopenent_1.html
Member since:2005-12-31
> That's not true. X.org includes an open&free nvidia driver, it just
> doesn't support 3D acceleration.
There is no point in arguing again and again whether this can be considered an "nvidia driver" if it doesn't support the card's features. Fact is that people who own an nvidia card have chosen it over other cards because of those features, and a driver that doesn't support the features is of little use for them.
> And now there's a project, called Nouveau, working on a free nvidia
> driver that should add 3D support sometime in the future.
This is a valid argument once they have reached their goal and the driver is available, and no earlier.
Member since:2005-07-24
"""Had RMS gotten hurd out the door quicker, we might all be using Gnu instead of Linux."""
Yeah, and if we could eat rocks we could use them for food. ;-)
Hurd predates Linux and *still* is not "out the door".
FSF has been trying to come up with a usable kernel for 21 years. (There was a previous attempt to base their kernel upon the TRIX kernel in the 80's... an attempt which failed utterly.)
In the end, Richard had no choice but to leech off of Linux, despite ideological differences.
Richard can be pragmatic, too, when it is necessary to further his political interests.
Edited 2007-01-10 15:16
Member since:2005-07-06
Had RMS gotten hurd out the door quicker, we might all be using Gnu instead of Linux.
Had RMS not used the AT&T copyright dispute to launch a campaign of FUD against BSD, we'd be using cleaner, freer, more standards-compliant, and more secure systems and he'd fade into obscurity as nothing more than the author of a fringe text editor.
But let's not get all caught up in "what-if"s, mkay? 
[For the record, I can't be too bitter: I'm posting this from an Ubuntu install that replaced OpenBSD on my laptop.]
Edited 2007-01-11 00:04
Member since:
2006-01-14
RMS didnt really have a choice in the development of Linux. He was working on Hurd at the same time Linus was writing Linux. However, the Linux kernel became much more usable quicker, and so it won out. People built an OS around the FSF tools with Linux as the kernel. Had RMS gotten hurd out the door quicker, we might all be using Gnu instead of Linux. Who knows if it would have attracted the same following though. RMS is very staunch in his views while Linus tends to be more practical. That refusal to bend at all may have left Gnu along the wayside. We certainly wouldn't have nividia drivers or decent wireless support under Gnu.