On Thursday 02 Sep 2010, Naveen Dhanuka wrote:
My take from his speech is that I see him as the silent soldier who has been defeated in the battle and the war and has not given up and is telling at every possible and permissible place what ETHICS and SACRIFICE and BLOOD & SWEAT that has gone into make solid engineering and given for free as free speech and not free bear.
That's a pretty sweeping statement to make, isn't it?
In my opinion, RMS is one of the most important figures in the field of computing, right up there with Turing and Tim Berners-Lee. If it weren't for him computing as we know it wouldn't have existed. And the Internet would have remained a small academic network connecting a few thousand universities. In fact, we wouldn't have been having this conversation at all.
RMS created the concept of free software. Every packet sent on the Internet today is processed by one or more free software-based packages somewhere along the line.
He also created GCC, thanks to which people could easily compile, enhance, modify and customise packages like Apache, any e-mail solution, PHP/Perl/Python/Java, BIND, a router kernel, etc. How many of these packages would have existed if GCC hadn't? Very few, I suspect.
After all that, to call him a "soldier who has been defeated" is just plain ignorant.
Regards,
-- Raj