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RMS' comments on hard beginnings... 30 September 2011 19:24
His comments on this particular topic grate me the wrong way each
time I see them. The GNU project was started around 1984. Sharing
software was the idea behind IBM's SHARE user group, started somewhen
in the '50s; by 1975 DECUS SIG TAPE ("come to the DECUS anual
conference with a tape with software, by the end of the conference
pick up your tape with everything collected") was in full swing. When
I first got into Usenet in 1984, among the more popular groups was
the comp.source.* hierarchy, devoted to swapping source code. The
whole "get rid of AT&T code in BSD" was done by 1990, but BSD proper
(worked on by hackers around the world and by UCB's CSRG) was started
around 1980. So this wasn't some "crossing the desert all alone," it
was part of the computer science mainstream and had been for quite
some time. Sure, the idea of copyleft license was revolutionary, the
rest ("replace Unix"; what for, 4.2 BSD was quite capable by the mid
'80s already and mostly open source) very much not news. I'm sure
that if it hadn't been for the unfortunate USL vs UCB lawsuit around
BSD code at a critical moment (real multiuser operating system
capable personal machines became affordable just then), GNU and Linux
would be obscure references to be hunted down in Wikipedia today.
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