Re: Linus Geek of the Week

["markw-4" <user=5@nabble.blu.org>]

 Hear! Hear! Yes, Richard Stallman had more to do with the existence of Linux. 

This is an example of the point I was trying to make. Linus wrote a 
mediocre, at best, kernel for MINIX. Stallman motivated developers, wrote 
code, worked on the GPL and created the very framework that makes up 
Linux. 

Stallman gets much less attention or credit in the main stream than Linus, 
yet he was the real creator of the whole movement it exists almost 
completely from his own work. 

Linus was just lucky. 


> I think the interesting thing here is that people focus on Linus 
> either because of a misconception about who makes an entire desktop 
> distro or because no one wants to focus on the radicalism of Richard 
> Stallman. 
> 
> It's interesting to me because I admire the principled stand of 
> Stallman and appreciate the technical drive of Torvalds. 
> 
> It's sort of why I have a soft spot for Tomas Paine, he took a 
> principled stand against British Rule, Royalism, Religion and all 
> systems that required people to never use their common sense. But in 
> the end he was almost arrested for seditious libel in England, almost 
> guillotined in France which had at first celebrated him and worse 
> lynched for being an atheist in the US and denied the vote in the very 
> country he helped create. 
> 
> We can not, and must not forget Stallman's work and foresight and 
> celebrate him for Free software which begat so many other movements; 
> weather he wrote the kernel or not, he wrote the ideas that the 
> license is based on and one of it's keys to it's success. 
> 
> Regards, Martin Owens 
> 
> 2008/7/20 Samuel Baldwin <[hidden email]>: 
>> 2008/7/20, [hidden email] <[hidden email]>: 
>>> I think "rather-good kernel" is overly generous. Take a look at the 
>>>  original source. 
>> 
>> He also said it probably wouldn't be ported. Then he titled his M.Sc. 
>> thesis 'Linux: A Portable Operating System'. So I don't think the 
>> original source applies at all to what it is now. And is anything 
>> "rather-good" at version 0.1? 
>