Hello,
On Thu, 04 Sep 2008, Arun Khan wrote:
> I am trying to reconcile the announcement's title "GNU Operating System"
> turning 25 i.e. celebrating it's 25th birthday. To me, this implies
> that the GNU tools (the Unix equivalents required for sys admin at a
> min.) and the HURD kernel (GNU OS) were available the day GNU was
> announced/formed.
I don't think that the HURD was even thought of 25 years ago.
(The first article about the HURD was on the net about 1990 or so).
The term "GNU Operating System" represents in loose terms "a free
alternative to Unix" (free as in mukta). And that idea _was_ born 25
years ago.[*]
> To the best of my knowledge the above combo is still not ready for
> public consumption [uber geeks may disagree :)].
Depends on what one takes to be the meaning.
a. There is not one --- there are many free alternatives to Unix.
In fact, there are perhaps *no* non-free Unixes anymore!
Does this owe a lot to the resolution made by RMS 25 years ago?
Absolutely. Of course, it also owes a lot to the resolve of
the hackers who followed up on this and took it well beyond what
he had in mind.
b. One can run the GNU tools + HURD combination to get an
environment as good or better than what was available as
Unix 25 years ago.
Does a general member of the public really need to do this?
No. There are currently a number of far superior solutions.
Does the software community need this? Yes. (See below.)
I think that there are a lot of people who disagree with RMS and
FSF today on a number of issues --- and they may even be right. I
sense that this makes them begrudge FSF celebrating the 25th
anniversary/birthday of GNU.
This should not take away from:
1. The vision and resolve RMS and the FSF put behind the vision ---
starting 25 years ago.
2. The cleverness of getting a rather well-known person like Stephen
Fry to celebrate on behalf of GNU. If any of the distros had managed
it, it would have been considered a coup!
3. While Linux may be the dominant player in Unix today, the
alternatives like *BSD, Solaris and even the HURD have an important
role to play in the development of free software.
4. That chocolate cake looks really delicious. :-)
So here's to (at least) another 25 years for GNU!
Regards,
Kapil.
[*] Of course, the *practical* minded people may disagree and say we
should celebrate "things" and not "ideas". Like it or not, the FSF
has always valued the latter over the former.
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