Who is the father of gnu movement

He requires anyone who changes the source code to share it with everyone. For more information on Linus Torvalds, see his homepage. Perens is known for being a voice of standards within the open source community, in the sense that he has been critical of attempts by several companies, such as IBM, Apple, and Sun, for halfhearted or poorly implemented attempts at open source projects.

In general, he is well respected and in the past these criticisms have played a part in influencing each company to change their policies. His role at HP, which includes challenging the management to rethink their approaches to open source, is a reflection of this. His hiring by HP is also a good example of the increasing interest and understanding of the open source phenomenon by larger computer companies.

For more information on Bruce Perens, see his homepage. Michael Tiemann, shortly after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, developed an interest in GNU software and was greatly impressed by its quality. Cygnus Solutions was enormously successful, and was eventually acquired by Red Hat ten years later. Tiemann is currently the chief technology officer of Red Hat, working to popularize the distribution of Linux and compete against proprietary software firms such as Microsoft and Sun.

Cygnus Solutions was one of the first companies to successfully adapted to the business model of adding value to free software by providing customized solutions and support. The envelope holds the software that computer users work with, for example, a calculator, file explorer, or a drawing software. The kernel of an operating system is the part that connects software to the hardware — the processor, the memory, the disk, and more. If we think of an operating system as a theater play, then the envelope is the stage, and the kernel is the mechanism behind the scenes: the lighting technician, the set manager, make-up artist and all necessary service providers that are needed to run the show.

Since the kernel is often the most complicated part of the operating system, Stallman, and the Free Software Foundation members decided to write it last.

When they were done with the envelope and were finally ready to write the kernel — it turned out that the task was even more complicated than they anticipated. The GNU project was stuck in a technological quicksand that threatened the entire Free Software movement: although the envelope was ready, there was no kernel — and without an operating system, it is impossible to write free software — and writing free software was the whole point.

Help came from an unexpected source. In August , a young Finnish student named Linus Benedict Torvalds , posted a message on one of the group chats:. This has been brewing since April and is starting to get ready. As mentioned, Richard Stallman was just looking for a suitable replacement for Hurd, the failing kernel of the GNU project, and found Linux to be very interesting.

At first, Stallman was reluctant about using Linux since Torvalds announced that his operating system could only support a certain type of computer known as AT. The important thing is that we did get a free kernel because someone wrote one. Adding Linux gave the GNU project a powerful tailwind. But even though Linux was an important addition to the GNU project, it also turned out to be somewhat of a Trojan horse.

The significant changes Linux created, or to be more accurate — the changes brought about by the young programmers it attracted — were about to create a serious rift within the young community of the Free Software movement. This rift and its consequences will be the focus of our next episode. We will talk about the split that occurred in the Free Software movement which led to the establishment of the open Source movement. We will also answer the question — why is Google trying to kill Android?

And we will also get to know Richard Stallman better — what does the guru think of modern software technology? You might be surprised to find out that he hardly ever uses it. In the previous episode, I introduced Richard Stallman, one the greatest hackers in computer history, whose bearded figure became iconic as the character of the Hollywood computer hacker.

Stallman is also one of my biggest heroes — he has been an inspiration to me from the moment I realized I wanted to be an engineer.

Even though Richard Stallman is admired by many, he is also considered to be… not an easy-going person , to say the least. I had a taste of this myself while trying to schedule a phone interview with him. He did agree to compromise on some of the demands when I explained that the website will not work without Javascript.

But, that takes moral courage! Rowling, the author of the Harry potter books, is too greedy. In , Stallman and his colleagues at the Free Software Foundation held a conference. The main speaker was Linus Torvalds. Of course, he was thrilled to assist the GNU project —but unlike Stallman, Torvalds was more interested in the technological aspects of software engineering and operating systems, rather than the social aspects.

They considered Powerpoint an abomination: a proprietary software by a company known for its ruthless business ethics. Using PowerPoint?! Yet the message Torvalds put forth in his speech — intentionally or unintentionally — hit a sensitive spot among the younger crowd.

At that point, the Free Software Foundation was over a decade old and many of its younger members grew up in a world much different than the world Stallman grew up in.

During the s and 70s, when computers were found mostly in academic institutions, free software was the norm while proprietary software was relatively rare. Proprietary software was all around, while free software was now rare. Of course, everyone believed in freedom and cooperation — but if you like a certain software and think it is useful, why not use it? Only because it is not free?? The rise of Open Source created an odd situation , perhaps even a bit surreal.

I get messages several times a week thanking me for my contributions to Open Source, and I have to write back to them and point out that there is a misunderstanding here. I support the Free Software Movement. I should point out that Open is not a movement. The whole point was not to be a movement. He also one of the more influential thinkers in Silicon Valley, and popularized the terms Web 2. I asked Tim about his recollection of the pre-Free Software movement period.

I was really deep in the UNIX culture of free software. It was this big collaborative barn-raising that built UNIX. I had become immersed in this culture and started documenting, filling in the gaps in the documentation for UNIX. I put together several documentation sets for clients. So, that was my world. It was the world of the shared community of UNIX. They all came out of UC Berkeley and that was part of the world I was living in. The narrative that said it began with the GNU Manifesto misses the fact that it was happening long before that, and if you look at the fruits of the tradition that was outside the scope of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Manifesto, they actually had a bigger impact.

All those people who were sitting there, trying to make the Linux desktop win against Microsoft, was this huge distraction for the better part of a decade.

The DNS was actually designed somewhere else. Some people mistook it to mean the software was distributed free of charge — and what costs nothing, goes the idiom, is worth nothing. In February , a few developers and entrepreneurs met in California, in an organization called T he Foresight institute.

The catalyst for the meeting was a dramatic announcement by the Netscape corporation that had taken place a month earlier. They decided it was their duty to educate the business world about the real advantages of free software: to emphasize the technical advantages of an open development model over a closed one.

To do so — they had to detach themselves from Richard Stallman and his ideological burden. He was the face and the heart of the Free Software Foundation, devoting his life to the Free Software movement and to the ideals they all believed in. But the conference participants felt that the philosophical discussion about freedom, control, and class struggle was hurting their cause.

They wanted to focus on the practical benefits of Free Software, such as the increase in innovation — but they all knew Stallman, and all knew he would never agree to that approach.

In he organized a conference of some of the best and brightest minds in the software world: Linus Torvalds, Guido Van Rossum the creator of Python , Larry Wall of Perl and many other luminaries. I was kind of thinking — I want to bridge these two communities, the internet community, and the Linux community. In the meantime, what I believe was six weeks before, Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute which was really a nanotechnology think tank, proposed the term Open Source. But it was not actually until during the day at that meeting that I heard the term Open Source.

We were talking about the naming issues, and Eric told about the invention of this term, Open Source, and actually there was quite a bit of push back! So, everybody who was there, we took a vote and Open Source won. So we had a press conference at the end of the day and we introduced the term. The way the press conference was set up was, I just had all these people behind a long table, and we had people from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, San Jose Mercury which at the time was the paper record of Silicon Valley, Forbes, and Fortune.

And I said, look — all these guys have an absolute market share in the category of software with no marketing budget, no company behind them, just on the strength of their ideas of this new development model and this model of giving away the software for free over the internet.

I went down a list: if you have a domain name, nytime. The fact that so many opinion leaders and experts sponsored the Open Source initiative helped push it forward , and within a few years it eclipsed its big sister, Free Software. There are thousands of communities , large and small, devoted to software tools of almost every sort imaginable: from word processing to espionage software.

Some projects last for many years — Linux is a great example — and some are a result of a weekend hackathons, fueled by pizza and soda. At this point I think we should take a slight digression, you might say, and ask ourselves what draws big tech companies to open source their software — that is, to give it away for free? To help with this question I sat down recently with Jonathan Israel of Wix.

Wix, says Jonathan, not only allows its developers to release code they worked on as Open Source — it wants them to do so:. R: Which brings me to an interesting question. OSI didn't create this programming model. We promote Open Source, which is just a marketing term for free software. Microsoft uses "Free Software" to describe their zero-cost software, but you'll notice that they call their not-quite-open-source software "Shared Source".

Infact If you read the above post, I have written He along with a group of like minded programmers started work in developing the tools needed to make a complete OS - like an editor Emacs , a C compiler GCC , libraries and all associated generic Unix tools like cat,ls, chmod etc.

But since he is the most public face of the GNU movement, everyone recognises him as the person who spearheaded the free software movement. Thanks for the insight into the open source initiative. I really enjoy all this!!! Being one of the user base, thank you for mentioning us!

Freedom Sancho, Really really interesting : The thing needed to keep on touch with the present time in short. Many thanks.. There was a version of Minix for , but since Minix was not free, it could not be distributed in complete form. You had to buy Minix, and then apply huge patches.

It was very awkward, so when the linux kernel came out and you did not have to jump through hoops like this, it was a big win. You ought to link to some of the source documents, like this one. As caricatural as creationism, stalinian and scientenlogist propaganda. This kind of pretentious and ignorant bigotry is the reason why linux has trouble to getting mainstream.

Should I kiss the feet of Eric Raymond? Gimme a break. Tim O'Reilly as propagandist. This is not reducing the merit of Linus and Richard to place them in a honest perspective. Anonymous above Can't you read the heading of the post?

And if the author includes all the names related to GNU movement, it wouldn't be concise would it? He has given more open source leaders than GNU leaders. I for one really enjoyed reading this post. It is informative. Kudos to the author for compiling this article. What a great concise chronological synopsis of the whole Linux movement up until now. I knew bits and pieces but it is really cool to see it all in one place.