Author Topic: Happy 35th Birthday GNU!  (Read 4688 times)

Martin Iturbide

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Happy 35th Birthday GNU!
« on: September 28, 2018, 06:51:32 pm »
Hate it or Love it, according to the news, GNU was publicly announced on September 27, 1983, so yesterday was the 35th anniversary of the GNU Project.

- Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later

Even that I dislike how Stallman turned free software into a holy way with people measuring who is more pure (free) than the other, I agree with what Soylent news has posted: "Richard Stallman's genius in crafting the copyleft license that is the GNU General Public License is probably the best hack of the 20th century software industry."

While everybody at that time was worried how to pull money and to create business models, nobody really cared about the impact of software on society. Even that today the GNU GPL can be seen as a reverse hack of the commercial copyrighted (I squeeze out every single dollar from software as it was a book) model, I still think it was genius at that time to focus on software for the common good and not just for business.

Even that "Software does not grow on trees", we have very interesting things on our platform thanks to the people touched by Stallman's original idea and his license.

Regards
Martin Iturbide
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Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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Re: Happy 35th Birthday GNU!
« Reply #1 on: September 29, 2018, 01:50:37 am »
Stallman and co may have started something in 1983, but the GNU name and the basic idea of the GNU license came years later and was nicked from gnuplot, a totally unrelated project. Surprisingly similar to how the same bunch has managed to take credit for EMACS retroactively ....