Photo by Pratheesh Prakash

IT HAS been a while since we least released an episode with Stallman. We published 6 short videos where Stallman spoke about the early days of GNU back in the 1980s. There is a new comment from a valued reader who says "Linux has nothing to do with Stallman."

"It's not as though Apple and Microsoft would have thrown away their kernels to replace them with pre-1.0 Linux back in 1991."It depends what one means by "Linux". A lot of people use the word to refer to the GNU system which was extended by the inclusion of Linux. And even if they refer only to the kernel, where would if it be if had no system to be integrated into (the first person to do this was a colleague of mine in Manchester Computing)? It's not as though Apple and Microsoft would have thrown away their kernels to replace them with pre-1.0 Linux back in 1991. In that sense, Linux is somewhat indebted to GNU.

A new post [1] shows a very deceiving timeline from the Linux Foundation, where Stallman only shows up some time around 1992, almost a decade after he started building the GNU system. This is revisionism and a distortion of history. It's not the first and it motivates or justifies the need for rebuttals. In the coming weeks we are going to release several different videos of Stallman talking about non-technical matters or Internet matters which do not involve operating systems. Stallman explains, among other things, that he believes demonisation of him might be part of a paid campaign. Incitations against him are common and they are usually not hinged on facts. ⬆

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. XX != Years of Linux

   There's a big problem with this "20 Years of Linux" graph, and many "XX Years of Linux" graphs as most all show an incomplete history or timeline of events and milestones. The one below for example.