Bonum Certa Men Certa

In Free Software, Nobody Gets Fired

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 18, 2026

Richard Stallman, A short Interview in Rome

Free software or freedom-respecting code isn't a company and is not "property" or "asset". It's more like public goods. As such, many of the same rules (or "logic") don't apply to it, even if companies like Red Hat (now IBM) can build a business around (or above) the freedom-respecting code, which can still be forked by anymore.

Hours ago we saw that Linux had been 'forked', maybe because of Torvalds (his love affair with slop) or maybe because of Rust People having a cargo cult-like fetish. It's not exactly a fork and it looks like avoiding bloat is among the goals. To quote the report: "Never mind not being a fork – Poseidon's kernel isn't even really a port of Linux. It's a rewrite, and a rewrite of a very early version. It's based on Linux kernel 0.11, whose source code you can peruse on this mirror."

This kernel is very old, but it is a public good; Liam Proven says: "This was an early kernel from December 8, 1991 – just a few months after the initial release, Linux 0.01. Version 0.11 was the last release of that first year of Linux. It was followed by version 0.12 in January 1992, then the version number jumped to 0.95 in March, as the young Torvalds started counting down to kernel 1.0 – which arrived two years later." Quoting the developer: "It's about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel."

Way to own one's code and project. █

Yesterday: "Corporate rules dictate that you always work on the shiny new product and leave the garbage to other people this is how you always become better and don't get laid off after 37 years"

Getting laid off after 37 years at Microsoft proves that loyalty is a corporate scam

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