On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 10:51:35AM +0300, geoffrey mendelson wrote: > On 7/6/2014 10:50 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote: > >Anyway, the GPLv3 or whatever licence the GNU sub-projects have > >does not prevent me from using GNU software, so that's it. > The interesting point is that outside of a relatively small group of > developers project GNU has no bearing on anything. Free (as in beer) > software existed long before RMS, open source software, including > operating systems, existed long before Linux, or even BSD. And it > continues to exist long after. > > I doubt that anyone one this list, or any other list for that > matter, runs 100% GPL licensed software on their computers. They may > be running only free and open source software, but I am sure some of > it has a BSD type, or other license.
The GNU system was intended to include X11 and TeX, so I doubt it if that was actually a goal. > > So to answer the question someone posed, would we be running the > same thing as we are now if RMS never existed? Probably not. > Something very close, YES. Would LINUX have existed? Maybe. Maybe > Linus would have spent his time improving the free. open source, BSD > instead. We actually may have been doing better because a lot of > time and effort was spent in the 1990's producing GPL'ed version of > BSD utilites that could have been spent elsewhere. There wasn't that much good BSD code out there when the GNU project started. BSD started provided a complete system at the beginning of the 1990-s. And shortly thereafter it got into a trial with AT&T. Also shortly after development was halted and much of it moved to proprietary forks. By then the basic system for Linux to use (sans kernel) was GNU. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
