RMS, SCO and 386BSD
Griff Palmer over at the Merc is an interesting guy. And his take on the SCO-IBM legal feud is pretty simple too - "More than once since the SCO mess came up, I've heard people say, "No problem. If SCO wins, we'll just go to *BSD." I guess open source types are "glass half full" kind of guys.
Griff notes I'm pretty nice in not nitpicking his essay - "I'm glad that someone of your technical stature doesn't find fault (or, at least, not fault enough to mention) in my piece." But I'm also a writer, and we all have got to stick together, especially when you write anything about a subject that people feel so emotionally about.
He goes on, "I halfway expected to get a note from Richard Stallman upbraiding me for not referring to it as GNU/Linux. I actually tried getting GNU/Linux in the paper, but couldn't get it past the editor." Well, we can always blame the editor, right.:-)
An RMS story - When I was at the Boston USENIX in 1982 as a young Berkeley student, I met this strange guy at MIT. He asked me about EMACS and I told him I like vi much better and would only use that. He demanded to know why - I told him why point by point, then walked off to do something else. He then proceeded to follow me around everywhere. The guy I was with (who later became my husband) was barely suppressing laughter. I said "Who the hell is this guy and why is he following me around?" He said "Well, that's Richard Stallman, and he wrote EMACS and you're telling him Bill Joy's vi is better."
And what was Griff doing back in 1989, when we were working on 386BSD: A Modest Proposal? In his own words:
"I was running CP/M on a Xerox 16/8! That Xerox was what really got me hooked on computing. The first newspaper job I had, in '74, was the last job I ever had where typewriters were used to generate news copy. (And even then, the copy was being keypunched onto paper tape in the composing room and fed into a primitive digital typesetter.) So I had the strong sense, from the very start of my career, that computers were something I needed to learn about. But when PCs and Apples/Macs hit the market, they were too darned expensive for a young newsman. Finally, in '89, I decided I just had to get some kind of computer -- any computer -- to learn something about this. I commissioned my brother-in-law, who has a master's in computer science, to find something I could afford. He discovered that a Bay Area company called Tredex was advertising a liquidation lot of 16/8s, brand-new in the box, for $250. Now, this was something I could afford!"