Happy birthday 🎊🎉 GNU/Linux.
Today GNU/Linux is 32 years old.
It was thankfully released to the public on August 25th, 1991 by Linus Torvalds when he was only 21 years old student.
What a lovely journey 🤍
Did stallman coat-tail Linux on day one, or did he latch onto the “ackshually, it’s got some gun in there so we deserve top billing” only a little after?
No, its because Linus Torvalds doesn’t consider libre software to be important. Torvalds sucks when it comes to free software.
GNU Hurd is an incredibly important project because there can’t be just one “free software kernel.”
Richard Stallman doesn’t care about popularity. He already changed the world. What he does care about is people forgetting their commitment to freedom.
He doesn’t give a shit if people say Linux, he does give a shit if people are “marketing” Linux without an emphasis on freedom.
Something that many have failed in.
What’s holding GNU/Hurd back? Can’t be hardware anymore since it became blazing fast
Nothing is holding hurd back. Debian and GNU Guix both ship hurd. The world has failed hurd instead.
Hurd will never accept firmware blobs or proprietary drivers. Thus, it will not work on OEMs who use those tactics for their machines. You are still able to install hurd in a VM as those have libre standards.
This is true for all GNU packages, not just hurd.
I first recall him trying to shoulder surf Linux’s popularity not long after the XFree86 project switched to a new license that included an acknowledgement clause, so around 2004/2005. I still chuckle when I see that he wants me to call it GNU/Linux, but he has a shit hemorrhage because XFree86 added a license clause requiring similar labeling. He’s made more than his share of contributions, but he takes pedantry to a whole new level.
Probably after he gave up on his own kernel (Hurd) being a viable competitor.
I hate this language, its so fucking dehumanizing. “Viable competitor” is such bullshit. Torvalds gave away his commitment to freedom with binary blobs. That’s his decision to do. But to label Hurd on that same level is the biggest disservice to history you could ever do.
Hurd will never be the “viable competitor” because you hold selfish attitudes about how makes software valuable or not.
Torvalds sold out. Hurd didn’t.
“Torvalds sold out.” Would you mind elaborating what you mean by selling out in this context?
@jsnc @JuxtaposedJaguar that seems a bit too “zealot” to me. And viable competitor is exactly the right phrase to use, or am I mistaken in thinking I use Linux instead of HURD?
Linux doesn’t have any GNU in it. Linux is a kernel that GNU runs on top of. That’s what Stallman means by “GNU/Linux.”
Maybe he is a little bitter about his life’s work and philosophy being erased by Linux fans, but that is understandable. Maybe he is a little too bitter.
People think it’s about Stallman being bitter. But it’s because GNU is a political project with the goal of total user freedom and control over their computer. The software is a step on the way there. But if people use free software without understanding, valuing or taking advantage of the freedom it gives them, the GNU project has failed.
Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds’s involvement; he “only” created and maintains the most popular kernel.
But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.
Are you sure unix will be created in the year 3.843063914 E+5636(1970!)
How would anything even survive 3.843063914 E+5636 years after the end of the universe to make unix
It is a happy coincidence that the evening before the 1970s began, at 4pm Pacific, they decided to invent UNIX.
I think it’s a joke about how UNIX timestamps work. They count milliseconds from January 1st 1970, 00:00:00 UTC, which is 4pm the day before in PST. So the happy coincidence is that they invented UNIX at the very millisecond when its clock starts.
There, ruined the joke.
If we are marking the birth of Linux and trying to call it GNU / Linux, we should remember our history.
Linux was not created with the intention of being part of the GNU project. In this very announcement, it says “not big and professional like GNU”. Taking away the adjectives, the important bit is “not GNU”. Parts of GNU turned out to be “big and professional”. Look at who contributes to GCC and Glibc for example. I would argue that the GNU kernel ( HURD ) is essentially a hobby project though ( not very “professional” ). The rest of GNU never really not that “big” either. My Linux distro offers me something like 80,000 packages and only a few hundred of them are associated with the GNU project.
What I wanted to point out here though is the license. Today, the Linux kernel is distributed via the GPL. This is the Free Software Foundation’s ( FSF ) General Public License—arguably the most important copyleft software license. Linux did not start out GPL though.
In fact, the early goals of the FSF and Linus were not totally aligned.
The FSF started the GNU project to create a POSIX system that provides Richard Stallman’s four freedoms and the GPL was conceived to enforce this. The “free” in FSF stands for freedom. In the early days, GNU was not free as in money as Richard Stallman did not care about that. Richard Stallman made money for the FSF by charging for distribution of GNU on tapes.
While Linus Torvalds as always been a proponent of Open Source, he has not always been a great advocate of “free software” in the FSF sense. The reason that Linus wrote Linux is because MINIX ( and UNIX of course ) cost money. When he says “free” in this announcement, he means money. When he started shipping Linux, he did not use the GPL. Perhaps the most important provision of the original Linux license was that you could NOT charge money for it. So we can see that Linus and RMS ( Richard Stallman ) had different goals.
In the early days, a “working” Linux system was certainly Linux + GNU ( see my reply elsewhere ). As there was no other “free” ( legally unencumbered ) UNIX-a-like, Linux became popular quickly. People started handing out Linux CDs at conferences and in universities ( this was pre-WWW remember ). The Linux license meant that you could not charge for these though and, back then, distributing CDs was not cheap. So being an enthusiastic Linux promoter was a financial commitment ( the opposite of “free” ).
People complained to Linus about this. Imposing financial hardship was the opposite of what he was trying to do. So, to resolve the situation, Linus switched the Linux kernel license to GPL.
The Linux kernel uses a modified GPL though. It is one that makes it more “open” ( as in Open Source ) but less “free” ( as in RMS / FSF ).
Switching to the GPL was certainly a great move for Linux. It exploded in popularity. When the web become a thing in the mid-90’s, Linux grew like wild fire and it dragged parts of the GNU project into the limelight wit it.
As a footnote, when Linus sent this announcement that he was working on Linux, BSD was already a thing. BSD was popular in academia and a version for the 386 ( the hardware Linus had ) had just been created. As BSD was more mature and more advanced, arguably it should have been BSD and not Linux that took over the world. BSD was free both in terms or money and freedom. It used the BSD license of course which is either more or less free than the GPL depending on which freedoms you value. Sadly, AT&T sued Berkeley ( the B in BSD ) to stop the “free”‘ distribution of BSD. Linux emerged as an alternative to BSD right at the moment that BSD was seen as legally risky. Soon, Linux was reaching audiences that had never heard of BSD. By the time the BSD lawsuit was settled, Linux was well on its way and had the momentum. BSD is still with us ( most purely as FreeBSD ) but it never caught up in terms of community size and / or commercial involvement.
If not for that AT&T lawsuit, there may have never been a Linux as we know it now and GNU would probably be much less popular as well.
Ironically, at the time that Linus wrote this announcement, BSD required GCC as well. Modern FreeBSD uses Clang / LLVM instead but this did not come around until many, many years later. The GNU project deserves its place in history and not just on Linux.
Something is open source or isn’t. There’s a set, binary definition.
I get the feeling you’re implying a difference/aversion between those two terms which doesn’t exist. This and the combination with a nonsensical statement about amount of GNU packages vs non-GNU packed makes it feel like you’re pushing an agenda here: There’s far more free software than just GNU’s - that’s a success for free software and the GNU project. There’s no connect between the argument you’re obviously implying.
Also HURD never took off - but why should it? The GNU project’s goal is a fully free operating system, with Linux being persuaded to adopt a proper license there’s no real need for HURD. It doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun project.
Which two terms? Everyone has an agenda but I am not sure what I am being accused of here. Do you mean Free Software vs Open Source? The FSF goes to great lengths to distinguish between those two terms:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html
I am pretty sure my usage is consistent with the owners and creators of those terms. Have I made an error?
The error is in saying something is made “more open source”. The definition:
https://opensource.org/osd/
Does your license uphold these rules? It’s open source. Does it not? It isn’t.
Quoting from memory: “Remember the times when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?”
won’t be big and professional like gnu
that didn’t age well
That’s debatable, since what people generally call “Linux” is more GNU than Linux anyway. “Linux” as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).
But what about Linux distributions compiled without GNU tools? Most popular Linux distribution’s kernel currently is compiled with Clang, not GCC, and as far as I am aware does not include anything from GNU. Of course Linux is historically influenced by GNU, but in current day and age they are orthogonal
Weight your words my friend! GNU’s a behemoth !
GCC alone is almost as big as Linux. Add core/binutils, the Hurd, … And you easily outclass the kernel itself !
~ $ du -sh linux-6.4.12/ gcc-13.2.0/ 1.5G linux-6.4.12/ 1.1G gcc-13.2.0/
Oh, and Emacs.
Speaking as someone that doesn’t understand computers very well: is Hurd usable as a kernel nowadays?
