Re: [OFFTOPIC] RMS and reactions to him

Nicolas Pitre
2003-01-18T02:52:46Z

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Richard Stallman wrote:

> I, for one, admit and recognize all the effort and work the GNU project did
> and I really enjoy exercising my freedom of running the GNU system on my
> hardware. This, however, won't make me call this system "GNU/Linux"
> regardless.
>
> I'm glad you appreciate our work, but if you call the system "Linux",
> you lead other people to suppose it was done by Linus. If you call
> it "GNU/Linux" you will teach other people to appreciate our work too.

All the people appreciate, they also endorse the principles of Free Software
when they see how good Linux can be, but they just can't care less about all
the ramifications underneath. Actually what's more important: the
proliferation of free software or perfect accreditation? (saying "both" is
too easy an answer).

This is unfortunate that you left out all my other arguments from my
previous mail. It shows that your quest for credits isn't coherent across
the board and that you wish to avoid that question. Well I'm sure you'll
come back with a perfect explanation for that...

Yet you say you're speaking not only for yourself but also for the
_hundreds_ of contributors to the GNU project. Either all those people feel
strongly about it and they all mandated a single person in the name of
Richard Stallman to bring justice to the World, or they simply feel they
like the name "Linux" is nice enough and left you alone to argue about it.
It truly looks like the later.

Nicolas