Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
> outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.
Most of that stuff was made available to universities and colleges as institutions, but not to individual students. Once you graduate, you have no effective (or legal) access to it anymore ...
Sure it was free (as in beer) but was it free (as in speech?) Could you modify and improve the compiler? If you did, could you redistribute it? Knowing bell labs, the answer is a definite no to the last one
Even after Sun got a C++ compiler for free for internal use (but not by their customers) by jumping into bed with AT&T, they still hired Michael Tiemann of Cygnus Support to port G++ to Solaris.
Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the World Wide Web to make it a freely available technology, so without stallman the net would be vastly different, likely staying fragmented between different protocols like it used to be. Plus, the operating system you're using likely has some GNU stuff in it somewhere
Most of that is incorrect and revisionist history. The Web was developed on a commercial system (the NExT from Steve Job’s company) and initial implementations were made on various commercial systems by differing groups. Even today, Linux is at most 50% of the web servers on the Internet.
There's even a funny story in there about how NeXT almost bypassed the GPL until GNU got Lawyers involved since them using a loophole would be very bad for peoples freedom
Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances
> Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances
I wanted to comment on this. Please correct me if I am wrong as I used LLM sources to find
But the other thing is that some servers (from Chatgpt, I am not gonna lie) it says that there's an Unknown/CDN servers around 20 or more% (I feel like its more) to then reach the ~88% data estimate in some sense.
So can someone please clarify me on this if this is the true case or not?
It was developed on a proprietary system (free software can be commercial) and yes, various implementations were made on said proprietary systems, but there were always free ones like lynx (the oldest browser still in development). Plus, Tim Berners-Lee was likely inspired by the GNU and BSD projects when he made the protocol royalty free
Curious what you mean by learning? Learning about TLPs? Learning about FPGA DMA Engines like XDMA? Learning about PCIe switches / retimers? Learning about `lspci`?
Nothing specific! I learned how to implement USB(-C) because there was some specific hardware I wanted to create. I could see the same thing happening with PCIe in future. With USB its longevity was fairly obvious to me, with PCIe I’m not well informed. Thanks for giving me some acronyms to explore!
I've been to Nepal a bunch of times and I usually recommend just passing quickly through KTM to get to where you are going. The dust can be terrible and it is loud and polluted - the opposite reason to why most people generally want to go to Nepal. Better to spend more time in the mountains or Pokhara
It's winter here. That's mostly an issue during summer. Also, if you're out trekking, then that is a non-issue (especially higher up in the mountains).
> and not have to worry about the right libraries being installed on my system and whether I've generated a Makefile. Packages are easily searchable, hosted on popular platforms like GitHub, and I can file bugs and ask questions without having to join an obscure mailing list or deal with an unfriendly community.
Maybe it's just me, but that right there is the stuff of nightmares. What library, and written by who, is it going to pull in.
But what's changed is decisively not "Now I don't know which libraries will be used or who made this library" but instead "The library I wanted was easier to get because the tools work".
Agreed. I don’t think easy package management is the problem, though. Rather, it’s just triggered a Cambrian explosion of packages, and now security needs to catch up.
It's direct and blatantly relevant to the discussion that the transformer was invented in America and the cited role of immigrants in that invention, resultingly showing how ending immigration will impact future innovation.
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