On Jun 1, 2014 8:11 PM, "Ronald Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
> Some UPSTART named RMS in his whole odipherous spledor couldn't even spell LINUX.

This I've always found ironic, that he's sore because people call the os linux and don't give gnu credit, when gnu itself was simply a unix ripoff.

Trying to empathize with the creators of unix, I think I would've felt like someone was stealing things I'd worked hard to produce. But I don't know. Like you said, he wrote manifestos and rants, so I might just as well have dismissed him as a nut. You could also take the magnanimous view that he was actually helping spread your ideas, albeit while putting his own political spin on things. I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to troll or start a flame war. RMS is something of an enigma to me.

<snip>

> RMS didn't even enter onto the UNIX scene until after he had been burned by LMI/Symbolics/MIT over contributions he made to the Lisp Machine that he assumed would always be freely available.     I was a rather late comer to UNIX, having not started on it until 1977,   RMS wasn't anywhere around until over a decade later.

I think he likes to throw 1984 around as the year he wrote the 'gnu manifesto'.

> I was happy that Ken and Dennis and the folks were coming up with the design pattern and not worrying about every single bug in the system.   This was RESEARCH.     Those of us in the direct trenches at the places that got UNIX under the "scrap metal" provisions got to make our own contribution by increasing robustness and performance as well as extended the underlying paradigm.

And it's a beautiful design that has adapted remarkably well to new technologies for decades.