People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
17 hours ago: (in Argentina)
Moments ago we saw a new article in Spanish, which starts with Richard M. Stallman (RMS), who visited Argentina many times and did interviews there (we mentioned one earlier this week in IRC). He also got robbed in Argentina. A decade ago he told me (RMS and I met a few times in the UK) that his camera was among the items in his then-stolen bag. In case people wonder why he often has his bag (important personal belongings) next to him in the podium, bear that in mind. It was a scarring experience. Never mind the event where people could not comprehend Spanish, the occasional hospitalisation (canceled talk/s) etc.
RMS does not have an easy life. But he has freedom (ease and freedom are not the same thing; sometimes freedom is the luxury of being able to say "no!"). That makes many people jealous. They then attack what they refuse to accept as a viable option, a possibility.
The above article, Open Source Software: entre la IA y el futuro , goes back to the roots and does not attribute "Open Source" to RMS; the caption says "Richard Stallman en los inicios del movimiento por el software libre, impulsando las cuatro libertades esenciales del usuario."
Yes, software libre... libertades etc.
Hours ago in 'Hacker' 'News' somebody wrote: "It was on Richard Stallman's radar in 1983 when he chose to model his GNU system on Unix. Note that at the time Stallman was also an employee of an elite institution (MIT's AI Lab)."
It moreover says that "Richard Stallman free-software movement was the main force driving the Unix design into the hands of the hobbyists, but it took almost a decade for it to do that. When David Cutler arrived at Microsoft in October 1988 to start the NT project, Unix was still mainly associated with elite institutions."
At the end UNIX won, but more so the free "clones" of it. In many contexts, not just servers and mobile, Windows became or always remained a negligible niche player. Now Microsoft runs out of money; people from Microsoft tell us that it is chaotic, as people get sacked based on their salaries, not their importance or capability. Put bluntly, Microsoft is running out of money. It's bluffing.
GNU/Linux (and BSD) is the future. It is.
In my experience, nowadays more people know about and recognise where it really started. More and more people now mention "GNU" by name. The Linux Foundation and its flunkies couldn't just delete it from history and purge it from people's collective minds/psyche.
Earlier this week RMS gave a talk in the EU (Italy) and it was probably his best attended talk since the trip to India. We wrote about it thrice or twice a day since, including in [1, 2, 3]. The audience had a grasp of who this guy was and that's why nearly 500 people attended, even at short notice (it was announced on Friday and happened on Monday, a holiday in the US and in the UK).
When RMS visited and gave talks in India we published: This is Why They're So Afraid of Richard Stallman (He Tells People the Correct History)
It is important for us to not only give correct attribution (a scientist's instinct and a matter of professional integrity) but also spread the message and ideals of free software and - by extension - of whole computers, including the hardware. For people to exercise control over their lives in an increasingly digitalised world they must insist on Software Freedom, probably as an nonnegotiable starting point. The rest follows from there...
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on. █
