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ESR probably wasn't personally needed. RMS may have been. Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot
by atq2119 7y ago
ESR probably wasn't personally needed. RMS may have been.
Either way, to your statement about "the movement", I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of what passes for hacker culture today is quite different from where those two hail from. How much overlap is there between the Tao of Programming and modern web development, for example?
Whether that's good, bad, or just a value-neutral observation is pretty much up to the beholder.
- btilly 7y agoStrongly agreed. ESR talked up his role and theories about how open source worked, but his writing was the main thing that he contributed. His attempts at contributing actual code did not have nearly the same impact. Nor has his description of how open source worked actually had the same impact. Even the OSI definition owes more to Ian Murdock (the "ian" in "debian") than it does to ESR. However if RMS and Brian Fox had not single-handedly set about reimplementing the Unix toolsystem back in the mid-1980s, the world would today be different. As much as RMS annoyed people by saying that Linux should be called GNU/Linux, he had a point. Linus contributed the kernel, but most of what people called Linux at the time was actually written by the FSF.