[TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie!

[Chet Ramey]

On 9/15/17 11:40 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:

> As well it should be.  My colors are showing here, but I'm really sick
> of the FSF slapping their name on other people's work.  If Stallman
> wants it to be called GNU/Linux let him write a kernel.  He didn't,
> he can't, yet he wants credit.  I got pretty disgusted back in the day
> when everything that was GPLed suddenly became a GNU project.  The GNU
> guys have written very, very little code.
> 
> They are all about the license, which is fine, but I get off the bus
> when they are claiming credit for work they did not do.

You are associating not having a lot of paid employees with not having a
lot of people do work under the FSF banner. That's not close to true.

It's true that the FSF had few full-time employees. They worked off
grants.

It's not true that these folks didn't produce a lot of work: they did.

It's true that the volunteers who donated their work to the FSF did so
fully understanding what they were doing. Arnold and I have first-hand
experience here.

It's true that there were a number of projects that petitioned to come
under the FSF umbrella, and were accepted.

It's not true that everything released under the GPL became part of the
GNU project and was listed on www.gnu.org/software.

I get that you don't like the FSF model, but the organization and its
volunteers produced -- and continue to produce -- a significant body of
good work. Linux as people think of it today (no, it's not just a kernel)
really wouldn't exist without it.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/