But your, Geoff, incendiary remarks re RMS, are quite out of place.
RMS' laudable stance on BDS is quite irrelevant to this list, in my
opinion.
Incendiary or not, his actions did have an effect upon the FOSS community.
Besides any direct effect in relation to RMS , the FSS and project GNU,
which is debatable, it caused Larry Ellison, who is a big supporter of
Israel in general and Sderot in particular to look elsewhere for his
open source aspirations.
By the time Oracle bought SUN, Solaris had become almost another Linux
distro. It included the SUN UNIX Kernel, and a lot of SUN proprietary
stuff, but more than half of it was project GNU software. You could see
that the intention was to replace the UNIX code with the GNU
alternatives. SUN also released a copy of their UNIX code as open
source, but not under GNU for legal reasons (most of it was already
under BSD license).
So Oracle dropped the open source Solaris version, it still exists, but
there is very little interest or support for it, and the GNU code is
slowly being replaced with non open source UNIX code or BSD code.
BUT the biggest effect was that Open Office, which was supposed to be
given to the FSF to help them replace their editor with something
useful, never happened.
Instead it went to the Apache Foundation and has been released under
their BSDish license.
So Marc, his actions may have been laudable or not, and my comments may
have been incendiary or not, but in the end it means that we are even
more so stuck with that f'ing editor. :-(
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson 4X1GM/N3OWJ
Jerusalem Israel.
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