7 ms·

LinuxWorld 1999, Torvalds and Stallman [video]

53 points by solarized 7y ago

Narishma 7y ago
Title should be LinuxWorld as that's the name of the expo.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
RMS never misses a chance to tell the world why it should be called "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux". Even at LinuxWorld.
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  ahem GNU/LinuxWorld.
  - abtinf 7y ago
    If GNU is there to signify all the surrounding tools that make Linux a usable system, then the conference should've been titled "San Jose Convention Center/LinuxWorld".
    - wrycoder 7y ago
      You mean to make writing the Linux kernel possible. RMS wrote gcc compiler, gdb debugger, and the shell tools first. Edit: to say nothing about the GPL, which is what really got the momentum going.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fit2rule 7y ago
I was there. Man, how things have changed. I'll never forget the feeling of getting Linux booted on my old 386 the day Linus posted about it to the minix-list .. what a rocket-ride its been!
- Crinus 7y ago
  If only that ride was towards better personal desktop computers where people have control over instead of towards data farms controlled by a handful of multinational corporations meant to be accessed by locked down mobile consumption terminals masquerading as social devices through supposedly open standards which are so complex as to only be implementable by said multinational corporations... it'd be nice.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    The ideal desktop is out there, you can find it and use it - there are certainly Linux distributions that fill your requirements. Then again: systemd. Grrumphh! :P
    - Crinus 7y ago
      I think you missed the point of my comment a bit :-P. It was about how mainstream technology today focuses on web-based stuff, data harvesting, mobile phones (and how they are way more locked down than your typical desktop computer - even when taking Windows into account), complexity of all these things, etc and desktop computers have fallen to the wayside (ironically everything mentioned is power by Linux). FWIW i think desktop peaked around Windows 2000 and on Linux around GNOME 2 and KDE 3.5, since then everything has becoming progressively worse. But -IMO- that is a consequence of the lack of focus on the desktop in general.
      - fit2rule 7y ago
        Yes, I think the OS vendors are asleep at the wheel, or they're drunk/high on the moolah to be made by putting the user out there in the data-harvesting markets. If we had still real OS vendors, there wouldn't be Dropbox or Facebook - these services would've just been folded in as user-controllable, user-centric services that the local OS manages .. I think the general public have been betrayed by those who should have been building better user-controlled operating systems, rather than exposing it all ..
mempko 7y ago
"Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Fleet" RMS always had the best sense of humor.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  One of the best geek quotes ever.
  - hi41 7y ago
    Could someone please explain that joke. For people who have watched Star Wars series it will be hard joke to understand. I have seen the more recent Star Wars movie but not the older ones in the series, so I understand few things but not deeply enough.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Episode IV - A New Hope Han Solo is the lovable "scoundrel" who shows up at the last minute at the first battle of the Death Star. He's an important yet minor factor in the battle which the Rebels have been preparing for, for years. Naming the victory after him is kinda silly. The metaphor lands "on many levels." Then Torvalds shows a distinct lack of class by doing the best he can to undermine RMS speech. I realize RMS is annoying most of the time, still it was pretty disappointing and unprofessional of him.
      - hi41 7y ago
        Thank you. I understand the joke now.
- INTPenis 7y ago
  I actually don't understand that analogy. Han Solo was part of the rebels no?
  - mempko 7y ago
rofo1 7y ago
Say what you want about RMS, he never sold out and stood on his principles. And his cause is noble. I might not agree with his methods 100% of the time, but I respect this man. And another thing: he was right about many "controversial" things, and was ahead of his time. I really think that him asking people to call the software GNU/Linux isn't that much to ask. Seriously, once you understand the amount of work GNU has done.. and it's all open and free.
- abvr 7y ago
  No, Richard, it's 'Linux', not 'GNU/Linux'. The most important contributions that the FSF made to Linux were the creation of the GPL and the GCC compiler. Those are fine and inspired products. GCC is a monumental achievement and has earned you, RMS, and the Free Software Foundation countless kudos and much appreciation. Following are some reasons for you to mull over, including some already answered in your FAQ. One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you? (An operating system) != (a distribution). Linux is an operating system. By my definition, an operating system is that software which provides and limits access to hardware resources on a computer. That definition applies whereever you see Linux in use. However, Linux is usually distributed with a collection of utilities and applications to make it easily configurable as a desktop system, a server, a development box, or a graphics workstation, or whatever the user needs. In such a configuration, we have a Linux (based) distribution. Therein lies your strongest argument for the unwieldy title 'GNU/Linux' (when said bundled software is largely from the FSF). Go bug the distribution makers on that one. Take your beef to Red Hat, Mandrake, and Slackware. At least there you have an argument. Linux alone is an operating system that can be used in various applications without any GNU software whatsoever. Embedded applications come to mind as an obvious example. Next, even if we limit the GNU/Linux title to the GNU-based Linux distributions, we run into another obvious problem. XFree86 may well be more important to a particular Linux installation than the sum of all the GNU contributions. More properly, shouldn't the distribution be called XFree86/Linux? Or, at a minimum, XFree86/GNU/Linux? Of course, it would be rather arbitrary to draw the line there when many other fine contributions go unlisted. Yes, I know you've heard this one before. Get used to it. You'll keep hearing it until you can cleanly counter it. You seem to like the lines-of-code metric. There are many lines of GNU code in a typical Linux distribution. You seem to suggest that (more LOC) == (more important). However, I submit to you that raw LOC numbers do not directly correlate with importance. I would suggest that clock cycles spent on code is a better metric. For example, if my system spends 90% of its time executing XFree86 code, XFree86 is probably the single most important collection of code on my system. Even if I loaded ten times as many lines of useless bloatware on my system and I never excuted that bloatware, it certainly isn't more important code than XFree86. Obviously, this metric isn't perfect either, but LOC really, really sucks. Please refrain from using it ever again in supporting any argument. Last, I'd like to point out that we Linux and GNU users shouldn't be fighting among ourselves over naming other people's software. But what the heck, I'm in a bad mood now. I think I'm feeling sufficiently obnoxious to make the point that GCC is so very famous and, yes, so very useful only because Linux was developed. In a show of proper respect and gratitude, shouldn't you and everyone refer to GCC as 'the Linux compiler'? Or at least, 'Linux GCC'? Seriously, where would your masterpiece be without Linux? Languishing with the HURD? If there is a moral buried in this rant, maybe it is this: Be grateful for your abilities and your incredible success and your considerable fame. Continue to use that success and fame for good, not evil. Also, be especially grateful for Linux' huge contribution to that success. You, RMS, the Free Software Foundation, and GNU software have reached their current high profiles largely on the back of Linux. You have changed the world. Now, go forth and don't be a nag. Thanks for listening.
nickjj 7y ago
Wow near the end when Linus takes his daughters on stage in the middle of RMS' speech. That's next level. Probably not scripted but it comes off as so undermining.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  It’s from a documentary (Revolution OS) and is an intentional edit to juxtapose the difference in the two men. The camera pans — Linus was presumably getting an award too. He’s standing off-stage, he’s not walking in while RMS is talking.
  - abvr 7y ago
    If a person watching this closely without any knowledge of the people in this video, they may just see Linus as one arrogant brat who could care less about anything the person speaking is intending to convey.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Nope, he walks them out in the middle of RMS speech, rude².
dankohn1 7y ago
Linus keynoted last month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit Shanghai, if you want to compare his views after 20 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM2Njj5PvNc4Mtcril2YyR95d https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM... (Those baby daughters on the stage in 1999 are in college now.)
traderjane 7y ago
> The open source movement focuses on practical advantages that you can get by having a community of users who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software. (Stallman) ... > Freedom to cooperate with other people, freedom to have a community, is important for our quality of life, is important for having a good society that we can live in. And that is, in my view, more important than having powerful and reliable software. (Stallman)
- vgetr 7y ago
  I mean, it shows (in Hurd, for example).
drewg123 7y ago
I met Linus at the Linux BOF at the 1994 Boston USENIX. Very ironically, I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD. It sounds like a cheap shot, but please hear me out: I was sysadmin'ing a university stats department at the time, and NFS use was very important. I had been trying to use Linux on 486's, but performance of xdvi (with NFS mounted fonts) was abysmal. A 486 would take minutes to render the same page that a wimpy DECStation could render in a second. From tcpdump, I figured out it was because Linux did not do any sort of NFS caching at the time, and xdvi wandered around font files one byte at a time. I asked Linus at the BOF when they planned to implement NFS. He told me NFS was unimportant, nobody used it, and so on. I then attended the FreeBSD BOF where a clean shaven guy in a collared shirt was giving a power point presentation. I asked about NFS there, and was told it should work fine. When I got home from the conference, I switched the 486 to FreeBSD, and it worked just fine. I eventually did OS research on FreeBSD, was one of a few people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha, and I now do kernel performance work for a large CDN, where we run FreeBSD.
marknadal 7y ago
Man, RMS is so bitter. Sorry all, I'm on team Linus.

53 points by solarized 7y ago

Narishma 7y ago

Title should be LinuxWorld as that's the name of the expo.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

RMS never misses a chance to tell the world why it should be called "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux". Even at LinuxWorld.

cbm-vic-20 7y ago
ahem GNU/LinuxWorld.
- abtinf 7y ago
  If GNU is there to signify all the surrounding tools that make Linux a usable system, then the conference should've been titled "San Jose Convention Center/LinuxWorld".
  - wrycoder 7y ago
    You mean to make writing the Linux kernel possible. RMS wrote gcc compiler, gdb debugger, and the shell tools first. Edit: to say nothing about the GPL, which is what really got the momentum going.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

fit2rule 7y ago

I was there. Man, how things have changed. I'll never forget the feeling of getting Linux booted on my old 386 the day Linus posted about it to the minix-list .. what a rocket-ride its been!

Crinus 7y ago
If only that ride was towards better personal desktop computers where people have control over instead of towards data farms controlled by a handful of multinational corporations meant to be accessed by locked down mobile consumption terminals masquerading as social devices through supposedly open standards which are so complex as to only be implementable by said multinational corporations... it'd be nice.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  The ideal desktop is out there, you can find it and use it - there are certainly Linux distributions that fill your requirements. Then again: systemd. Grrumphh! :P
  - Crinus 7y ago
    I think you missed the point of my comment a bit :-P. It was about how mainstream technology today focuses on web-based stuff, data harvesting, mobile phones (and how they are way more locked down than your typical desktop computer - even when taking Windows into account), complexity of all these things, etc and desktop computers have fallen to the wayside (ironically everything mentioned is power by Linux). FWIW i think desktop peaked around Windows 2000 and on Linux around GNOME 2 and KDE 3.5, since then everything has becoming progressively worse. But -IMO- that is a consequence of the lack of focus on the desktop in general.
    - fit2rule 7y ago
      Yes, I think the OS vendors are asleep at the wheel, or they're drunk/high on the moolah to be made by putting the user out there in the data-harvesting markets. If we had still real OS vendors, there wouldn't be Dropbox or Facebook - these services would've just been folded in as user-controllable, user-centric services that the local OS manages .. I think the general public have been betrayed by those who should have been building better user-controlled operating systems, rather than exposing it all ..

mempko 7y ago

"Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is sort of like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Fleet" RMS always had the best sense of humor.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
One of the best geek quotes ever.
- hi41 7y ago
  Could someone please explain that joke. For people who have watched Star Wars series it will be hard joke to understand. I have seen the more recent Star Wars movie but not the older ones in the series, so I understand few things but not deeply enough.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    Episode IV - A New Hope Han Solo is the lovable "scoundrel" who shows up at the last minute at the first battle of the Death Star. He's an important yet minor factor in the battle which the Rebels have been preparing for, for years. Naming the victory after him is kinda silly. The metaphor lands "on many levels." Then Torvalds shows a distinct lack of class by doing the best he can to undermine RMS speech. I realize RMS is annoying most of the time, still it was pretty disappointing and unprofessional of him.
    - hi41 7y ago
      Thank you. I understand the joke now.
INTPenis 7y ago
I actually don't understand that analogy. Han Solo was part of the rebels no?
- mempko 7y ago

rofo1 7y ago

Say what you want about RMS, he never sold out and stood on his principles. And his cause is noble. I might not agree with his methods 100% of the time, but I respect this man. And another thing: he was right about many "controversial" things, and was ahead of his time. I really think that him asking people to call the software GNU/Linux isn't that much to ask. Seriously, once you understand the amount of work GNU has done.. and it's all open and free.

abvr 7y ago
No, Richard, it's 'Linux', not 'GNU/Linux'. The most important contributions that the FSF made to Linux were the creation of the GPL and the GCC compiler. Those are fine and inspired products. GCC is a monumental achievement and has earned you, RMS, and the Free Software Foundation countless kudos and much appreciation. Following are some reasons for you to mull over, including some already answered in your FAQ. One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you? (An operating system) != (a distribution). Linux is an operating system. By my definition, an operating system is that software which provides and limits access to hardware resources on a computer. That definition applies whereever you see Linux in use. However, Linux is usually distributed with a collection of utilities and applications to make it easily configurable as a desktop system, a server, a development box, or a graphics workstation, or whatever the user needs. In such a configuration, we have a Linux (based) distribution. Therein lies your strongest argument for the unwieldy title 'GNU/Linux' (when said bundled software is largely from the FSF). Go bug the distribution makers on that one. Take your beef to Red Hat, Mandrake, and Slackware. At least there you have an argument. Linux alone is an operating system that can be used in various applications without any GNU software whatsoever. Embedded applications come to mind as an obvious example. Next, even if we limit the GNU/Linux title to the GNU-based Linux distributions, we run into another obvious problem. XFree86 may well be more important to a particular Linux installation than the sum of all the GNU contributions. More properly, shouldn't the distribution be called XFree86/Linux? Or, at a minimum, XFree86/GNU/Linux? Of course, it would be rather arbitrary to draw the line there when many other fine contributions go unlisted. Yes, I know you've heard this one before. Get used to it. You'll keep hearing it until you can cleanly counter it. You seem to like the lines-of-code metric. There are many lines of GNU code in a typical Linux distribution. You seem to suggest that (more LOC) == (more important). However, I submit to you that raw LOC numbers do not directly correlate with importance. I would suggest that clock cycles spent on code is a better metric. For example, if my system spends 90% of its time executing XFree86 code, XFree86 is probably the single most important collection of code on my system. Even if I loaded ten times as many lines of useless bloatware on my system and I never excuted that bloatware, it certainly isn't more important code than XFree86. Obviously, this metric isn't perfect either, but LOC really, really sucks. Please refrain from using it ever again in supporting any argument. Last, I'd like to point out that we Linux and GNU users shouldn't be fighting among ourselves over naming other people's software. But what the heck, I'm in a bad mood now. I think I'm feeling sufficiently obnoxious to make the point that GCC is so very famous and, yes, so very useful only because Linux was developed. In a show of proper respect and gratitude, shouldn't you and everyone refer to GCC as 'the Linux compiler'? Or at least, 'Linux GCC'? Seriously, where would your masterpiece be without Linux? Languishing with the HURD? If there is a moral buried in this rant, maybe it is this: Be grateful for your abilities and your incredible success and your considerable fame. Continue to use that success and fame for good, not evil. Also, be especially grateful for Linux' huge contribution to that success. You, RMS, the Free Software Foundation, and GNU software have reached their current high profiles largely on the back of Linux. You have changed the world. Now, go forth and don't be a nag. Thanks for listening.

nickjj 7y ago

Wow near the end when Linus takes his daughters on stage in the middle of RMS' speech. That's next level. Probably not scripted but it comes off as so undermining.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
It’s from a documentary (Revolution OS) and is an intentional edit to juxtapose the difference in the two men. The camera pans — Linus was presumably getting an award too. He’s standing off-stage, he’s not walking in while RMS is talking.
- abvr 7y ago
  If a person watching this closely without any knowledge of the people in this video, they may just see Linus as one arrogant brat who could care less about anything the person speaking is intending to convey.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Nope, he walks them out in the middle of RMS speech, rude².

dankohn1 7y ago

Linus keynoted last month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit Shanghai, if you want to compare his views after 20 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM2Njj5PvNc4Mtcril2YyR95d https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjR1Ht__9KE&list=PLj6h78yzYM... (Those baby daughters on the stage in 1999 are in college now.)

traderjane 7y ago

> The open source movement focuses on practical advantages that you can get by having a community of users who can cooperate on interchanging and improving software. (Stallman) ... > Freedom to cooperate with other people, freedom to have a community, is important for our quality of life, is important for having a good society that we can live in. And that is, in my view, more important than having powerful and reliable software. (Stallman)

vgetr 7y ago
I mean, it shows (in Hurd, for example).

drewg123 7y ago

I met Linus at the Linux BOF at the 1994 Boston USENIX. Very ironically, I have Linus to thank for a long career using FreeBSD. It sounds like a cheap shot, but please hear me out: I was sysadmin'ing a university stats department at the time, and NFS use was very important. I had been trying to use Linux on 486's, but performance of xdvi (with NFS mounted fonts) was abysmal. A 486 would take minutes to render the same page that a wimpy DECStation could render in a second. From tcpdump, I figured out it was because Linux did not do any sort of NFS caching at the time, and xdvi wandered around font files one byte at a time. I asked Linus at the BOF when they planned to implement NFS. He told me NFS was unimportant, nobody used it, and so on. I then attended the FreeBSD BOF where a clean shaven guy in a collared shirt was giving a power point presentation. I asked about NFS there, and was told it should work fine. When I got home from the conference, I switched the 486 to FreeBSD, and it worked just fine. I eventually did OS research on FreeBSD, was one of a few people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha, and I now do kernel performance work for a large CDN, where we run FreeBSD.

marknadal 7y ago

Man, RMS is so bitter. Sorry all, I'm on team Linus.