Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

This iteration of the rms vs. lbt flamewar feels ... different, somehow. Maybe the moderation's still ongoing or something? Normally, us rms-siders are in the vocal majority, with a few anti-rms posts (as well as the inevitable showering jokes) thrown in for good measure. This time, not only is the discussion more fifty-fifty, but there's a lot more "doesn't GPLv3 restrict your freedoms? Isn't this all about the freedoms?" and "Without Linus open-source would be nowhere"-type comments. While the latter point atleast makes a reasonable argument (read it again: GPLv3 does not impose usage restrictions, only distributional ones), I'd still give the vote to rms. I value a free-as-in-freedom software stack a whole lot more than a kernel. The GNU toolchain is behind Mozilla Firefox, probably the most talked about open source software at the moment. I love being able to get wget or curl for my machine no matter what bizarre combination of systems I might be using (okay, one of those isn't GPL, I know this ... okay, wget->GPL(exception), cURL->MIT). And holy cow, GCC compiles MySQL and PHP, which together run the modern day library of Alexandria.

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I was going to argue that Firefox is the most used OSS around, but - come to think of it - Firefox has what, a 10-20% share of the browser market? Optimistically? Google has 70+% of the web search market, and every time anybody hits Google for a search, all those Linux machines in the great Googlebrain are activated. But I suppose nobody really knows about that.

Ho, hum. I was going to write about work, but now I'm all written out. Maybe tomorrow or something. Man, this weekend could potentially get unbelievably busy. And House is back on Monday! Hallelujah!

Labels: free software, linus, open source, opinion, ramblings, rms

This post was posted by Unknown at 1:06 am