The first time any BSD code was made publicly available was Networking Release 1 (just contained the networking stack) in 1989, or around 5 years after Stallman started the GNU project. It took until Networking Release 2 in 1991 for the code for a runnable BSD operating system to be made publicly available. Prior to that, BSD was based on proprietary UNIX source code, and anyone who wanted to run it had to purchase a source code license from AT&T.
> or around 5 years after Stallman started the GNU project.
So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings?
GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time. I'm not discounting anything Richard did but let's not rewrite history here.
> So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings?
Or around 4 years after the first public GNU Emacs release, 4 years after the first public GNU Bison release, 3 years after the first public GDB release, and 2 years after the first public GCC release.
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
Correct, just like how the initial public BSD release was just the networking stack (worthless on its own).
> There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time.
Not sure where you got that from. Nobody claims that Stallman was the first one to come up with publicly releasing source code. I will say that a lot of the "public domain" software from back then lacks the uniformity you see from later movements like free software or open source. Some of it isn't even public domain, and has a license like "this is copyright me, any modified copies must have my copyright statement preserved, this software may not be used for commercial purposes".
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
People were installing GNU onto existing Unix systems because GNU was better than they were distributed with. Maybe they did that with components of BSD Net/1 - no one has ever told me they did but it probably happened - but that was definitively post GNU.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this matters so much to the debate. Stallman was reacting to a change. He rambled politically and wrote some code to back it up because he used to be able to do things, and now he could only do them if he would write some code and win some allies.
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
Whether or not GNU had an OS or would ever have an OS has nothing to do with anything, though. What are you trying to illustrate? Those "pieces and components" are some of the most used pieces of software in history.
