OT: 'conduct unbecoming of a hacker'

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 18:09:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Pretty funny that he chose Stallman as his example of a guy who 
> gets stuff done, whose Hurd microkernel never actually got 
> done, :) though certainly ambitious, so Stallman would never 
> have had a FOSS OS on which to run his GNU tools if it weren't 
> for Linus.

Well, 386BSD was there in 1992-1994, and several other OSes, so I 
don't think Linux is that special. Linux did have the right 
timing. Amiga and other specialized hardware was becoming less 
attractive at that point in time, and students were getting x86 
PCs with MMUs and wanted an OS that was more like Unix, but less 
crude than Minix.

But I don't think Hurd is much of a Stallman coding-project. His 
core project is the GPL and he did created Emacs and GCC which 
were very important for the spread of the GPL.

Before GPL most academic software had very limiting "free for 
non-commercial educational use" clauses in their licenses. The 
GPL itself is much more important than any individual piece of 
software.

> As for the main point about useless bickering replacing 
> hacking, that's probably because it was a much smaller 
> community back then, so it consisted of only the really 
> hard-core who wanted to _do_ something, whereas now it's 
> expanded outside that group to the more half-hearted.  Either 
> that or he has on the usual rose-colored glasses for the past, 
> the usual veteran complaint, "Everything was better when I was 
> young!" :D

Well, both Emacs and GCC have had their forks... so. Yes.