June 14, 2004

Richard Stallman at Google

 Emacs | Google | People
Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs

Last week Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software, visited Google. He gave an introduction to free software and what it means. He emphasized on the differences between free software and open source, and why Linux is really GNU/Linux.

Having followed his arguments for few years now, they sort of make sense. I can see however why people have so many problems with his personality and ideology. He tends to quickly dismiss most of the questions with a "it makes no sense" type of answer.

As a hacker however, all the respects to him, he has managed to get us a long way from where software was in 1984 to where it is now. Emacs, GCC, GDB, most of the standard Unix tools that run on Linux today are directly due to him.

Posted by ovidiu at June 14, 2004 09:46 PM |
Comments

Actually, James Gosling is the originator of Emacs (and a few other things of less consequence, such as NeWS and Java).

Stallman is the author of GNU Emacs, which, it is true, brought most of the advancements we know in Emacs today.

Posted by: Fazal Majid on June 14, 2004 11:21 PM

Err, Mr. Majid, Stallman is the originator of Emacs (from TECO macros, IIRC). Gosling made a port of Emacs (GOSMACS). Google should throw up something.

Posted by: JM Ibanez on June 15, 2004 04:23 AM
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