Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers?

Richard Stallman
2003-01-09T23:04:27Z

There is no such thing as an open source community. The people who
founded the open source movement in 1998, and the people who support
it now, are part of the free software community. (We in the free
software movement built the community in the 80s with our determined
effort.)

These people are legitimate members of our community, and they have a
right to form a movement to promote their views; but their views
didn't build the community, so it should not be named after their
movement.

It's not ment to be a disrespect to you and what you've
done certainly, but it's definitely smashed the scale and scope
of free software projects.

The GNU system, with Linux added, had a great deal of success, but
attributing that success entirely to Linux is a misinterpretation of
the events.

Why do so many people misinterpret the events this way? The practice
of calling the system "Linux" leads to and encourages the
misinterpretation. It leads people to suppose that the most important
part of the development of the system must have occurred when Linus
Torvalds started to work on it.