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I won't dismiss that he's been successful, but he's one of the people that I dislike the most in the tech industry. If GNU stuff didn't exist, he probably woul
by gkya 11y ago
I won't dismiss that he's been successful, but he's one of the people that I dislike the most in the tech industry. If GNU stuff didn't exist, he probably wouldn't even be able to compile and run his own work back in '91. All of the success of Linux is because there was a userland in search of a kernel. And if it wasn't for thousands of guys coding up drivers for Linux, Torvalds would probably end up an embedded guy in a washing-machine company.
GNU has been crucial to the flourishment of community-developed software today, both with their effort in creating the tooling, and their effort in keeping it accessible and liberated. So, the Linux guys need to learn to say thank you, because it's for GNU that there is a Linux for which development they get paid and feed their families.
After all, who cares about a kernel, as a user? For me, currently, if it supports the ath5k driver, and runs Emacs and supports POSIX, it's OK. I switched to FreeBSD, and, well, I didn't really notice anything.