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Tux Machines
Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sep 08, 2023,
updated Oct 12, 2023
Wowie zowie! The Gnu System is turning 40, and its parents — the folks at Free Software Foundation — are throwing it a party to celebrate, and y’all are invited!
Gnus eating cake
Officially they’re not calling it a party, it’s a hack day, but since they make it clear that no hacking is required (and go out of their way to make it known that there will be cake) I’m calling it a birthday party under the “if it walks like a duck” rule.
Here’s what Miriam Bastion, the program manager at FSF, had to say about it when she announced the event a few weeks back...
Read on
Linux Magazine:
> Of this anniversary, The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had this to say: "Four decades ago, technology began to shape our lives: it was the early 1980s, computers did not yet fit into our pockets but filled large rooms. and we started to swap from tapes and floppies to CDs to listen to music. In 1982, Time magazine named the computer ‘Person of the Year’."
SJVN:
> Would you believe that almost all of the technology you use today is here because of a misbehaving printer? Believe it.
FUDZilla:
> I'm a GNU how do you do? The nicest sort of Gnature in the zoo
> The Free Software Foundation celebrated "the 40th anniversary of the GNU operating system and the launch of the free software movement," with an announcement calling it "a turning point in the history of computing.
> On September 27, 1983, computer scientist Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop a free software Unix-like operating system called GNU, for "GNU's not Unix."
LWN:
> On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman announced the founding of the GNU project. His goal, which seemed wildly optimistic and unattainable at the time, was to write a complete Unix-like operating system from the beginning and make it freely available. Exactly 40 years later, the GNU project celebrated with a hacker meeting in Switzerland. Your editor had the good fortune to be able to attend.
> An anniversary like this, one might think, would be an occasion for a fair amount of introspection and planning for the future. That was not the case here, though. There was almost no looking back at GNU project history, little evaluation of strategy or tactics, and no planning for the coming years. The GNU project, it seems, is happy with what it is and feels no need to talk about where it is going as a whole.
> The one exception, perhaps, was Panos Alevropoulos, who works on the Free Software Foundation's efforts to end software patents. Some good things have happened in those 40 years, he said; free software exists for almost every purpose, free social networks (including the fediverse) are rapidly growing, the quality of the software is high, and it is supported by a community of passionate people. On the other hand, he said, many features and capabilities still come to proprietary software first, there is no 100% freedom-respecting hardware, no prospect of regulatory action against digital rights management or software patents, and free software is still either unknown to or misunderstood by the general public. In many ways, he said, the project has failed to meet its goals.
> This failure, he said, shows that a strategy centered around the development of software is not enough. What is needed is a way to make free software the default for more users. That might be done by creating applications that achieve industry-standard status; VLC, he said, is a good example of how that can work. Working to ensure that software developed with public money is free (something that, as Matthias Kirschner emphasized earlier in the day, the Free Software Foundation Europe is pushing hard for) is another step. Eventually, he said, consideration could be given to banning proprietary software entirely; not everybody in attendance was convinced that the GNU project should venture into advocating for changes to copyright law, though.
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