On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:04 AM, Levi Pearson <levipear...@gmail.com> wrote: > I know very well who he is and how cool of a hacker he used to be. He > created lots of cool stuff, and I'm really glad he did. But sometimes > guys who created cool stuff decide they have another calling in life > and move on. That's what RMS did. I'm not really interested in what > he moved on to, and I don't think anything he's likely to say to a > group is going to touch on the technical aspects of using Linux today. > I'm sure he still uses it, but that's because it's what he knows and > it's what fits his philosophy and social agenda. Linux would exist > just fine without GNU, and if it didn't, we'd all be using > BSD-derivatives instead. I was using Linux when it first took off, > and the world was primed for something like it to take off. The only > reason BSD didn't take the popularity surge that Linux did was a small > and short-lived licensing issue that existed right at the cusp of > things. I would be fine if BSD had taken off instead of Linux + GNU, > really. We'd be largely in the same place, except maybe we'd have > fewer Free Software zealots and religious wars over licenses. > > I'd love to hear him talk about his MIT AI Lab days and how the Lisp > Machines there worked. I'd love to hear him talk about the > development of emacs and how he uses it today. I'd love to hear about > how he was involved in developing gcc and the technical details about > how it's put together (I've actually had to fix a bad port of gcc to > an embedded platform I was using, so something like that would have > been very useful to me at one point). I'd love to hear him talk about > any of the cool things he might have done if he hadn't dedicated his > life to lecturing and advocating about Free Software. I really doubt > he'd talk to a group about any of that stuff. He'd talk about Free > Software and why he believes it's so important. That's fine that he's > passionate about that now, but I don't really care and I don't think > it's particularly relevant to helping people get stuff done with Linux > or their computers in general. > > --Levi
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