Re: Linus Geek of the Week

["Stephen Adler" <user=65@nabble.blu.org>]

 http://linuxgazette.net/issue37/adler.html

[hidden email] wrote: 
> Hear! Hear! Yes, Richard Stallman had more to do with the existence of Linux. 
> 
> This is an example of the point I was trying to make. Linus wrote a 
> mediocre, at best, kernel for MINIX. Stallman motivated developers, wrote 
> code, worked on the GPL and created the very framework that makes up 
> Linux. 
> 
> Stallman gets much less attention or credit in the main stream than Linus, 
> yet he was the real creator of the whole movement it exists almost 
> completely from his own work. 
> 
> Linus was just lucky. 
> 
> 
>   
>> I think the interesting thing here is that people focus on Linus 
>> either because of a misconception about who makes an entire desktop 
>> distro or because no one wants to focus on the radicalism of Richard 
>> Stallman. 
>> 
>> It's interesting to me because I admire the principled stand of 
>> Stallman and appreciate the technical drive of Torvalds. 
>> 
>> It's sort of why I have a soft spot for Tomas Paine, he took a 
>> principled stand against British Rule, Royalism, Religion and all 
>> systems that required people to never use their common sense. But in 
>> the end he was almost arrested for seditious libel in England, almost 
>> guillotined in France which had at first celebrated him and worse 
>> lynched for being an atheist in the US and denied the vote in the very 
>> country he helped create. 
>> 
>> We can not, and must not forget Stallman's work and foresight and 
>> celebrate him for Free software which begat so many other movements; 
>> weather he wrote the kernel or not, he wrote the ideas that the 
>> license is based on and one of it's keys to it's success. 
>> 
>> Regards, Martin Owens 
>> 
>> 2008/7/20 Samuel Baldwin <[hidden email]>: 
>>     
>>> 2008/7/20, [hidden email] <[hidden email]>: 
>>>       
>>>> I think "rather-good kernel" is overly generous. Take a look at the 
>>>>  original source. 
>>>>         
>>> He also said it probably wouldn't be ported. Then he titled his M.Sc. 
>>> thesis 'Linux: A Portable Operating System'. So I don't think the 
>>> original source applies at all to what it is now. And is anything 
>>> "rather-good" at version 0.1? 
>>>       
> 
> 
>