--- Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Thursday 03 April 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
So I put it to Luke thus (and I'm echoing Leo): If Stallman (the most hardheaded and fervent Free Software advocate on the planet) and Torvalds (the reason you're here) both say it's cool, how is it that you feel that your viewpoint is superior?
Torvalds has nothing to do with why I'm here. If Linux didn't exist, we'd be using either HURD or a BSD kernel.
HURD development reminds me a great deal of Charles Babbage's failed attempt to create his "Difference Engine": GNU keeps changing the goals and the design so often that HURD might as well be vaporware. Even now they've had one year longer than Linux to develop HURD (possibly 8 years longer if you include the "TRIX" years) and they're just getting around to a bug-ridden crash-prone version 0.2, barely usable as a hobby machine and certainly useless as a production machine.
As for a BSD kernel having the success BSD "licensing" might as well be "public domain" for all the protection it doesn't offer to the developer. A BSD kernel with a BSD license can be "Embraced, Extended, And Extinguished" in typical Microsoft fashion. The only reason there's a viable competitor to Microsoft today is that the competitor's kernel is not using a BSD license, but rather the GPL license.
If Linus hadn't brought in his kernel, UNIX would still be in the server rooms and not in the public eye, and we certainly wouldn't have anything to discuss here. Saying that any of the so-called "alternatives" to Linux would have taken over without Linux is completely ludicrous.
Stallman doesn't think everything should be free, and admits there is a legal problem, so what's your argument again?
Where does Stallman actually say there's a legal issue?
"So what did Sun actually do? It allowed more convenient redistribution of the binaries of its Java platform. With this change, GNU/Linux distros CAN INCLUDE the non-free Sun Java platform, just as some now include the non-free nVidia driver. But they do so only at the cost of being non-free."
Stallman doesn't actually "admit there is a legal problem", so what's your argument again?
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