Bonum Certa Men Certa

Abundance of Good Code, "Just Like Air."

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 18, 2025

Reflections On Water, Bright Background

"Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air."

-Richard Stallman

This morning we rebooted the London-based server hosting the sites, IRC, Git, Gemini and so on. We had a new kernel to load. The server, unlike my personal computers, has many ports open to the whole world. For my personal computers the risks (or risk factors) are different, so I still use a kernel from 2023 and only Free software is installed. It'll soon be 600 days since the last reboot:

roy@vonick:~$ uptime
 14:07:36 up 586 days, 19:52, 40 users,  load average: 0.76, 0.80, 0.72

My second laptop is trailing not by much:

roy@bubi:~$ uptime
 14:12:13 up 521 days,  5:24,  3 users,  load average: 7.75, 7.39, 7.31

This shows just how good the code is. If 4GB of RAM can be enough for millions of processes to be spawned (over time), memory leaks accounted for too, why would anyone choose Windows? For the former PC it's close to 4 million processes already and just over 3 million for the latter. My wife's laptop also runs Free software, it's still snappy (4GB of RAM), and it was last rebooted 447 days ago.

Richard Stallman's (aka RMS) seminal manifesto and foundational (practical) work on GNU gave us a very solid system that facilitates productive work without concerns over spyware. There are good reasons why he rejects DRM (like Steam) and proprietary software (which tends to spy, either secretly or not; without sources code it's hard to restrict such unwanted behaviour).

Hours ago an influential vlogger, Salvatore Sanfilippo, was paying respect to RMS. More and more people realise where is all started. RMS. Many companies don't want people to find this out because then they might learn about freedom (as in, control over one's computer) and never again consider proprietary things as a "first option" or "default". I had many arguments over this in Sirius Open Source [sic] towards the later years. I wasn't the only one there to use the "f" word (freedom).

The Microsofters still look for creative new ways to attack Richard Stallman and, as we'll explain tomorrow, they try to interject ad hominem attacks on Dr. Stallman into our trial against them [1, 2]. They must be scared. Perhaps even desperate. They don't even use Free software for their communications.

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