4 ms·

Well, a UNIX clone that was proprietary wouldn’t have become popular like GNU did. If you have to pay for it why not just use the real one?

• linguae 10mo ago
  I think if Richard Stallman had no qualms about proprietary software, he would have remained in the Lisp machine world, either working for Symbolics or Lisp Machines, Inc., or perhaps starting his own thing. Stallman was a Lisp hacker before starting GNU, and even when deciding on cloning Unix instead of creating a free Lisp-based OS, one of his first projects was GNU Emacs. An interesting thought experiment is what Stallman would’ve done in that alternate timeline in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Lisp machines were killed off by advances in commodity hardware and compiler technology, the end of the Cold War (the US military was a large customer of Lisp machines), and the AI winter (Lisp used to be synonymous with AI).
  • __patchbit__ 10mo ago
    The `metadot' idea lives on in emacs and future AI should amp that to the max behind magical design.
  • b112 10mo ago
    So you're saying time travelers came back in time, and caused the end of lisp architecture, solely to prevent an AI singularity years before we could possibly cope with it.
• pjmlp 10mo ago
  UNIX originally wasn't closed source anyway, and most people like nowadays, only cared about the freebeer parts. GNU only took off when Sun created the split between user and developer UNIX SKUs, which other UNIX vendors were quick to follow as well. Suddenly having access to UNIX no longer meant having development tools around, if the server wasn't to be used by developers themselves. Thus installing GNU became a common workaround to pay for a UNIX developer license.