The GPL? The GPL is a good idea, but every one of my lawyer friends has told me that it would never hold up in court. The wording is too vague, there are too many loopholes, etc. Its main strength (that it's not lawyer-speak) is also its main weakness. There's a reason that most software licenses are many pages long, it's so that they will hold up in court. The GPL has yet to be challenged (mostly because anyone interested in selling software won't touch it with a ten foot pole, they hate viral licensing) but I imagine that if it ever is, it will lose. Like I said, it's a good idea, but the actual wording of the license is apparently so bad that it's just about worthless.
All that aside, unix existed before GNU. Everything GNU made was just a clone of the tools from the BSD4 distributions. X11R6 has been around longer than GNU. Linux would exist without the GNU tools, true, it would not be the same, but it also would not be the same without apache, perl, X, etc. If we're going to call it GNU/Linux, we also need to call it GNU/Apache/XFree/Perl/my/postgresql/Linux. Linux is not just the kernel, as RMS purports, but the amalgamation of the work of many people. He shouldn't take it personally that we don't want to stroke his ego, it's just that there are so many groups involved, it's easier to just call it all "Linux." As for the notion that the GNU dev tools are necessary, this is not true. Many of us use some sort of package distribution system. These packages are not necessarily compiled with gcc or GNU make. True, one of the reasons for Linux's popularity is the fact that it's a cheap development system, but it's not necessary to have a stable, working system. Heck, gcc isn't even that good of a compiler, Intel's optimizing compiler offers 30% better compiled performance than gcc can. I've also compiled Apache, sendmail, and perl on non-gnu systems (IRIX, SunOS) and they work just fine. RMS holds some interesting views on freedom and politics, but I'd hardly call him a revolutionary. He seems to me like a textbook libertarian who is interested in intellectual property. I'd love to see him speak, but if he doesn't want to because we don't want to pet his ego by recognizing him above all the other major contributors to the Linux community, then let him speak elsewhere. Anyway, just my $0.02. -Ryan -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Shane Williams Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 10:27 AM To: Paul Sack Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Siglinux] my 2c on the name change Except that you (as in a linux user) might not have X, apache, perl (which is not GPLed) or MYsql if you didn't have free tools such as gcc, make, sed, Gawk, binutils, bison, diffutils, fileutils, gdb, grep, RCS, shellutils, and probably a number of Gnu libs like zlib, pth, ncurses and libpng. Without these GNU tools, Unix might still belong exclusively to the old-gaurd companies like Sun, Alpha, HP, IBM, etc. And don't forget tar and gzip, which while not critical to building other software, certainly made it alot easier to share code with others over the internet. And that's just the list of software that makes other source code practical. There's a also a lot of software people use on a daily basis not related to production of code and compiling. GPG, Gimp, bash, emacs, finger, gnome, less, etc. And finally the greatest creation of Stallman and Gnu, the GPL itself. Without it, MySQL probably wouldn't have gone open source. They were developing it in house for their own use. If no license had existed which protected their code like the GPL, I doubt they would have gone to the trouble of inventing such a license. When you look at it that way, maybe there's some substance to Stallman's position, regardless of how poorly he represents the position. His ultimatum makes him look like primadonna whining baby. He needs to recognize the sad fact that some of the greatest contributions to science and technology go unrecognized. Now, all that doesn't necessarily convince me that a name change is appropriate, but neither do I think RMS is a raving lunatic. He's just a frustrated revolutionary that believes credit should be given where it's due, which is something that just doesn't always happen. On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Paul Sack wrote: > I think many questions are about X configuration. What about Apache? Perl? > MySQL? > > None of these are even GPLed. > > Samba is GPLed, but is not a GNU project either. > > Network configuration is also a popular topic here, and that has little to > do with GNU. > > The gcc is more important than any of these, but not more important than > all of these. Other than gnome or gcc questions, I can't think of any > questions asked recently on this list about GNU s/w. > > Remember: All GNU apps are GPLed, but most GPLed apps are not GNU, and > would probably exist without the GPL. -- Public key #7BBC68D9 at | Shane Williams http://pgp.mit.edu/ | Systems Administrator UT-GSLIS =----------------------------------+------------------------------- All syllogisms contain three lines | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Therefore this is not a syllogism | www.gslis.utexas.edu/~shanew _______________________________________________ Siglinux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux _______________________________________________ Siglinux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux
