The GNU Project is Bleeding Into Microsoft

TechRights ^ | 29 June 2020 | Thomas Grzybowski

[ShadowAce]

Tech Ping

[EEGator]

?

[Red Badger]

What’s GNU?..........................

[FatherofFive]

What’s GNU?..........................

Not much. What's GNU with you?

[Red Badger]

I knew somebody would do that!................

[Red Badger]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

[ShadowAce]

The acronym stands for "GNU's Not Unix". It's a recursive acronym.

It's the project Stallman started to created a system very much like Unix, but not steal any code.

It's basically Free software--free as in speech.

[plsvn]

Richard Stallman was ousted?! That’s like getting rid of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. Stallman was a way left lefty, too.

[SanchoP]

There are a number of empirical signs of the breakdown of boundaries between Free Software and Microsoft, such as the “Windows Subsystem for Linux”, but most insidious is the movement of GNU development processes onto the Microsoft-hosted platform, GitHub.

HELLO!!!--------HELLO!--------- What about systemd?

[ShadowAce]

Also—GNU and the Linux kernel combine to form the various “Linux distos” like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mint, etc.

[The Free Engineer]

Stallman was cancelled as an sensitivity challenged old white guy.

[HighSierra5]

It’s a female wildebeest.

[kosciusko51]

I find this deceptive and very concerning. For a number of important reasons, hosting GNU development on a proprietary Microsoft platform should be verboten.

I wish the author would have stated the reasons more fully, rather than some vague insinuations.

[ShadowAce]

Yeah—that’s the weak point of his article. I thought about not posting it because of that, actually.

[plsvn]

Stallman was cancelled as an sensitivity challenged old white guy.

Sensitivity challenged? That's not the Stallman I read about over the years!

BTW, I still use his EMACS editor. Never took to vi. EMACS just always made sense to me as a particularly useful text editor.

[Tunehead54]

"I wish the author would have stated the reasons more fully, rather than some vague insinuations."

---

If all the GNU (Free, open) posts first go through Micr$oft) then the harvesting and patenting by M$oft gives them expert first in line overviews of good ideas for them to monetize and restrict to their products would be my guess.

With a tweak here and there, voila a new patent that M$oft has the resources to beat down any independent programmer and his original programming.

That's my take.

[ConservativeMind]

I understand his “concern,” but the licenses still say everything is owned by the effort and anyone can host the code anywhere they want and the code is freely available to all.

I don’t like Microsoft, but, frankly, I never like Stallman.

I believe the best license is the old Borland license for commercial software and BSD for the rest.

The problems the GNU/GPL crud brought wasn’t worth anything over what BSD licenses already had out there. With BSD, companies don’t have to freak over a developer making changes to libraries or the like.

When I was younger, I maintained my computer club’s public domain software library. Public domain should be equal to BSD. Stallman perverted it with socialist ideals, saying that you owed your changes/work to everyone else and “we’ll sue you if you don’t give them.”

[cymbeline]

I use MBED which uses Github. It’s an embedded software/hardware development site. I have my source code up there and compile and link using their tools in their servers.

It works ok. Why should I care about an affiliation with Microsoft?

Why do I need to care about GNU?

[kosciusko51]

You may be right, but the author left it for our imaginations rather than say it.