New Unix Implementation Turns 30 290
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.
GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix. We will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems. In particular, we plan to have longer filenames, file version numbers, a crashproof file system, filename completion perhaps, terminal-independent display support, and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen. Both C and Lisp will be available as system programming languages. We will have network software based on MIT's chaosnet protocol, far superior to UUCP. We may also have something compatible with UUCP.
Who Am I?
I am Richard Stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated EMACS editor, now at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. I have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the Incompatible Timesharing System and the Lisp Machine operating system. I pioneered terminal-independent display support in ITS. In addition I have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for Lisp machines.
Why I Must Write GNU
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.
How You Can Contribute
I am asking computer manufacturers for donations of machines and money. I'm asking individuals for donations of programs and work.
One computer manufacturer has already offered to provide a machine. But we could use more. One consequence you can expect if you donate machines is that GNU will run on them at an early date. The machine had better be able to operate in a residential area, and not require sophisticated cooling or power.
Individual programmers can contribute by writing a compatible duplicate of some Unix utility and giving it to me. For most projects, such part-time distributed work would be very hard to coordinate; the independently-written parts would not work together. But for the particular task of replacing Unix, this problem is absent. Most interface specifications are fixed by Unix compatibility. If each contribution works with the rest of Unix, it will probably work with the rest of GNU.
If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time. The salary won't be high, but I'm looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money. I view this as a way of enabling dedicated people to devote their full energies to working on GNU by sparing them the need to make a living in another way.
For more information, contact me.
Arpanet mail:
- RMS@MIT-MC.ARPA
Usenet:
- ...!mit-eddie!RMS@OZ
- ...!mit-vax!RMS@OZ
Re:Where can I get this? (Score:4, Informative)
For what it's worth:
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/ [gnu.org]
Re:30 years on (Score:4, Informative)
HURD ain't done 'til Linux won't run!
As Hurd can't run on any semi-modern machine anymore (lacking small details like SATA or USB support), you actually need Linux (/Windows/OSX/Solaris) to host a VM...
Re:Megalomanic (Score:5, Informative)
Good troll, sir. Try removing everything except /boot, see how much your computer can do.
Re:Today (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Today (Score:3, Informative)
> RMS has nothing to do with "open source".
"open source" is primarily just corporate friendly branding for Free Software. It's primarily a marketing job to accentuate the pragmatic benefits of Free Software over the political motivations RMS might tend to focus on.
Re:Megalomanic (Score:2, Informative)
No. He didn't. Was he a part of it? Absolutely but GNU has never produced a usable unix or unix like operating system and it certainly wasn't RMS it was hundreds of thousands of free software and open source developers.
Ask yourself, "What software projects does RMS devote his time too?". To my knowledge, not many if any. He is a great advocate and he has done many things for our community but he did not complete what he set out to do.
Re:Megalomanic (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected [bell-labs.com]. Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language [wikipedia.org] was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun. You don't write a proposal and ask a company like AT&T to spend millions to have fun.
Furthermore, 30 years ago was 1983, meaning that Unix had been around for about 13 years already, and had already forked into BSD Unix and AT&T System V. It was already quite huge by that time.
Re:Megalomanic (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure if you actually believe that or it is more trolling. In case you really believe it, feel free to stand corrected [bell-labs.com]
Unix was a very serious project funded by a monopoly (at the time) called AT&T - specifically AT&T's Bell Labs, and the C language [wikipedia.org] was literally invented by Kerhnigan and Ritchie just so they could develop it. The goal was certainly not to have fun.
You didn't get much right in your reply, in fact much of it is backwards. Allow me to correct you. They originally requested a computer to write an operating system, but that was denied. They then bootlegged a computer, wrote a game, and hacked on an operating system without it being an official project, and eventually got buy-in to buy a computer to build a text processing system, not an operating system. Unix was already in existence by the time they were allowed to purchase a computer for the text processing system. (I will also note that as a monopoly they were under very tight restrictions about what they could do with Unix in terms of sales.) From the above paper:
Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' ....
Also during 1969, Thompson developed the game of `Space Travel.' First written on Multics, then transliterated into Fortran for GECOS (the operating system for the GE, later Honeywell, 635), it was nothing less than a simulation of the movement of the major bodies of the Solar System, with the player guiding a ship here and there, observing the scenery, and attempting to land on the various planets and moons. The GECOS version was unsatisfactory in two important respects: first, the display of the state of the game was jerky and hard to control because one had to type commands at it, and second, a game cost about $75 for CPU time on the big computer. It did not take long, therefore, for Thompson to find a little-used PDP-7 computer with an excellent display processor; the whole system was used as a Graphic-II terminal. He and I rewrote Space Travel to run on this machine. The undertaking was more ambitious than it might seem; because we disdained all existing software, we had to write a floating-point arithmetic package, the pointwise specification of the graphic characters for the display, and a debugging subsystem that continuously displayed the contents of typed-in locations in a corner of the screen. All this was written in assembly language for a cross-assembler that ran under GECOS and produced paper tapes to be carried to the PDP-7. ...
Space Travel, though it made a very attractive game, served mainly as an introduction to the clumsy technology of preparing programs for the PDP-7. Soon Thompson began implementing the paper file system (perhaps `chalk file system' would be more accurate) that had been designed earlier. A file system without a way to e
Re:Today (Score:5, Informative)
RMS has some controversy, but I do remember in the early 1990s what was out there, UNIX-wise.
You had XENIX, ULTRIX, IRIX, A/UX, AIX PS/2, AIX/370, Dell UNIX, SunOS, and many other flavors. Almost none came with source, and if they did (Mt. Xinu was the only BSD that did), you had to get a special license for SVR4 programs.
If you wanted header files and libraries, pay up. C compiler? Better have that cash for the flexlm key. C++? Pony up a couple grand.
Had it not been for RMS and gcc, access to a C compiler would have been the bottleneck for most world software development.
Before 1991 and Jolitz and Linus inventions, if you were a college student and wanted to see a "#" prompt on a computer, good luck unless your blackhat skillz were good. Even just getting a "$" prompt (or a "%" prompt if you were a novice) took some doing as one had to be at a big university.
After 386BSD (not to be confused with Mt Xinu BSD-386) and Linux, a lot changed. Arguably, this allowed hardware and software to be less of what one had to concern themselves with, versus what application was being run. Had it not been for gcc, neither Linux, nor 386BSD would have been possible, because of EULA and copyright restrictions.
It is scary how much times have changed. Today, one did decide to go off and write a new OS, one might find themselves on the wrong side of the law because it didn't have a hardware-enforced DRM stack, or that "terrorists" might be able to use it. The irony of it all... In the mid 1990s, I remember a lot of improvements done on the SMP part of the Linux kernel by the the Iran University of Science and Technology. This wasn't even something that one would worry about, as back then, if you were on the Net, there was some respect [1]. These days, just the mention of that would get people screaming about terrorism and backdoors.
Of course, there was encouragement, especially if one had a reasonable effort going and mentioned it on USENET groups. You did have the occasional detractor, but generally writing something, anything was encouraged. Now, with the shills and trolls out there, one almost has to write something in a vacuum, release it, and expect consequences for the action like it was a crime.
[1]: At the time the buffoons were on the warez BBS systems bragging about their new US Robotics HST modems... well, until September came rolling around each year, and the wave of college freshmen came in only to get housebroken or access yanked by the sysadmins.
Re: Megalomanic (Score:3, Informative)
Adoption would have happened sooner if it weren't for an AT&T lawsuit only it wouldn't have been Linux, it would have been BSD. So yes, absolutely.
BSD was far more advanced and would have remained so, all without GNU. There was demand and interest PLUS a mature non-GNU codebase. There was a legal cloud over it that didn't resolve until Linux gain sufficient momentum. Without lawsuit troubles, GNU and Linux would likely have never existed AND we'd be better off.
Listing RMS as first among "all contributors" is an insult to all contributors. RMS hasn't been a contributor for a long, long time. His "contributions" are politics, increasing license restrictions, and renaming other people's products to give himself glory.
Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS (Score:2, Informative)
Except for BSD which came before, so they got the ball rolling that was rolling already.
It's directly analogous to claiming that Gnome got the ball rolling on a GUI for X since you dismiss anything that came before that wasn't GNU.
Re:Raise a glass to you, RMS (Score:4, Informative)
BSD wasn't a free software OS for a long time. It included significant parts of licensed AT&T code and you could not get BSD without also having a Unix license. Even for those programs implemented originally as part of BSD you still needed a license to get access to the source code and sys admins would have it locked up tight. Even a CS student at a university might need special permission and a project to get access. Things opened up tremendously after AT&T code was scrubbed out, but that was after GNU started.
Re:Contrary to popular belief (Score:5, Informative)
RMS started his free software stance because of the harm he saw that occured with Emacs and he wanted to prevent similar future harm. He didn't just come up with this out of the blue or for no reason.
The existing Unix port of Emacs from James Gosling has been shared, and Stallman and others had been modifying that to improve it to become the first GNU Emacs (such as adding a real Lisp instead of MockLisp as well as making it behave more like older Emacs). Then Gosling put a copyright on his Emacs and sold it to Unipress. Unipress then told Stallman to stop distributing his own Emacs because it now contained copyrighted code. So a marathon hacking session was done to rip out all the older code to sanitize it. And that was the impetus for the GPL.
Ie, older code for a product that had been customarily shared (no one person "invented" emacs, it was a highly collaborative and incremental product). Then one port of it was sold to a company and all the shared code that existed prior to that sale was now tainted and could not be distributed. This directly led to the core principle of the GPL that existing free code could not be made un-free. Also a very big reason why most people do not want people to release any source code that comes without a license included.
I'm not even a big fan of the GPL myself but I respect it. Maybe Stallman seems too idealistic or too paranoid to some people but the reasons for his stance are clear and reasonable.
Re:Where can I get this? (Score:5, Informative)
So credit where credit is due: GCC will let you shoot your own foot without complaint, but it's a bit slow on the feature list. Whereas the big-time Windows compiler... it's got all the latest features,
Wait what? Compared to gcc, VS has all the features?
Which planet do you hail from?
GCC has complete C99 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has complete C++11 support, VS doesn't.
GCC has a more complete support of C++14 than VS.
gcc is a far, far more up to date compiler than visual studio.
[*]I'm going to keep calling it FORTRAN for ever. suck it.
Misrepresenting RMS is unfair. (Score:4, Informative)
"I've seen articles that call me "The father of open source". Now what use is it to be talked about if I'm associated with the wrong views! So I sent a letter to the editor saying, "If I'm the father of open source it was conceived through artificial insemination using stolen sperm without my knowledge or consent"." —Richard Stallman, August 5, 2013, New York City University, New York City, USA
I believe he'd be the first to point out to you that you are misattributing the movement he started (as he frequently mentions in his talks such as this one [gnu.org] around 58m25s including being talked about with the wrong views at around 1h). RMS wrote the GPL and started the GNU Project so that users could live in freedom enjoying the freedoms to run, share, and modify computer software; the very freedoms that the open source movement was formed to never bring up [gnu.org] so the open source proponents could pursue mere technical practicality (a term he describes well around 57m10s) and talk about "licensing terms" as you describe—free of ethical issues. The way you put it makes the two movements seem like some insigificant name difference for no particular reason, but that's completely untrue. Giving the wrong philosophical views credit happens elsewhre too and correcting this misapprehension is the basis for giving GNU a share of the credit when discussing a GNU/Linux system.
Careful speech and well-explained distinctions are among rms's hallmarks—he speaks and writes with a precision not often found these days. The GNU Project has helpfully collected a list of terms to avoid [gnu.org], terms people often speak or write without understanding how their own thoughts could be pure nonsense or clear misstatement. It behooves people describing him and his work to get these terms right. After all, it's only fair that one not misrepresent his views when describing him.
Perhaps you'd benefit from watching a few of his speeches [gnu.org] so you can better understand what he says and thinks, then perhaps you won't make the errors you made in your post.