Skip to main content

Happy belated 25th GNU!

The GNU concept was announced more than a quarter of a century ago on a mailing list by Richard Stallman. The date was Sept. 27. I am a few weeks late mentioning it.

In fairness, the founding of the Free Software Foundation did not happen until a couple of years later and I would expect that to be a bigger celebration. We shall see.

I wrote an article about Richard Stallman a number of years ago where I said:

"Here is what Richard has done for us all: He has created and protected the 'free software' movement. This has been a difficult task against great odds and he has taken a lot of unwarranted personal grief over the years."

True Liberty in all of its various forms still gets a bad rap. It was ever thus.

I am gratified that a true champion of Freedom like Richard Stallman and people like Lawrence Lessig are still around. They have taken outrageous attacks over the years, but I think that might finally be starting to settle down for them. Of course, one worries that this might be preamble to attempting to co-opt them. Lessig appeared to cave a little on DRM, but I can't see Richard ever being anything but his own man.

Congratulations to the FSF and to all of us. It is a milestone worth celebrating.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The system cannot execute the specified program

It always annoys me no end when I get messages like the following: "The system cannot execute the specified program." I got the above error from Windows XP when I tried to execute a program I use all the time. The message is hugely aggravating because it says the obvious without giving any actionable information. If you have such a problem and you are executing from a deep directory structure that may be your problem. It was in my case. Looking on the web with that phrase brought up a bunch of arcane stuff that did not apply to me. It mostly brought up long threads (as these things tend to do) which follow this pattern: 'Q' is the guy with the problem asking for help 'A' can be any number of people who jump in to 'help'. Q: I got this error "The system cannot execute the specified program." when I tried to ... [long list of things tried] A: What program were you running, what operating system, where is the program? What type of

Crucial SSD BIOS update

Executive summary: If Crucial Storage Executive can't see your Crucial drive, you may be able to fix that by re-running as Administrator.  Windows 10 continues to be a nightmare. The latest update has caused my machine to go wonky and it was suggested that, for reasons unknown, my SSD boot drive needed a BIOS update.  The drive in question is a Crucial MX500 CT500MX500 S SD1 and the BIOS update is from M3CR020 to M3CR023.  I initially attempted to burn and boot from a DVD ROM, but that came back with an error:  "could not find kernel image boot/vmlinuz64" You would think that something whose sole purpose is to boot into one program could get that right. That is, you would think that this very basic thing would have been tested prior to release. Sigh. No doubt there is a tortured route to get that thing to boot, but for me there was an easier way. You would think that Crucial would have offered that up first rather than the burnable image, but not in my case.  I then insta

When code writes code, what do developers do?

When code writes code, what do developers do? As we head further into a future where things are automated, people’s last refuge will be curation in a bright future or serving others in a dark future. Curation devolves into saying what you want and iterating through a few rounds of “not that.” As a programmer, I always found automated programming tools laughable. We are still mostly there, but ML/AI is changing that. At one point, many people sagely nodded their heads and said computers would *never* beat a human at chess. Never. I disagreed. I thought that it was ***inevitable*** that they ***would*** beat humans ‘hands down.’ That is well behind us now. It is only a matter of time until all human ‘jobs’ will be doable by machines. Each one, including being a companion. As of now, the bottleneck is energy and knowledge. I think we will crack fusion, but if we do not, we can still harvest billions of times what we use now from the sun in space. The knowledge is increasing rapidly.