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posted by takyon on Friday September 28 2018, @10:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the latent-killswitch dept.

Happy 35th Birthday GNU!

The GNU project was officially announced on 27 September 1983 by Richard Stallman. Thirty-five years of a project that has now become the fundamental building block of everything we use and see in technology in 2018. I would not be wrong to say that there isn't a single proprietary piece of software that anyone is still using from 35 years ago – please post comments if there is something still being used.

There is only one reason for this longevity: the GNU project was built upon the premise that the code is available to anyone, anywhere with the only restriction that whatever is done to the code, it shall always be available to anyone, forever. Richard Stallman's genius in crafting the copyleft license that is the GNU General Public License is probably the best hack of the 20th century software industry.

Extra: Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later


Original Submission #1   Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by pTamok on Friday September 28 2018, @10:52AM (3 children)

    by pTamok (3042) on Friday September 28 2018, @10:52AM (#741269)

    I would not be wrong to say that there isn't a single proprietary piece of software that anyone is still using from 35 years ago...

    I got Nerd Sniped [xkcd.com] by that pretty badly. Sigh. DYOR, but the number of counter-examples are legion.

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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Friday September 28 2018, @12:30PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 28 2018, @12:30PM (#741302) Journal
    My company has an important part of its business running on a mainframe with a proprietary OS dating from the 70s. That would be more than 35 years.
  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 28 2018, @02:53PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 28 2018, @02:53PM (#741351) Journal

    What about proprietary software that is, in some form, descended and evolved from 35 years ago?

    1980's: p-System, Pascal, MPW Pascal
    1990's: the p-System wrapped inside a DOS EXE, Some Turbo Pascal, later FoxPro
    2000's: Visual FoxPro, some PHP
    2010's: Web application in Java

    Each of those transitions didn't happen on the exact decade boundary. And multiple products are involved, not a single product.

    All along the way there has been tooling to convert customer data. There is probably not any single customer database that transitioned from the very first to the very latest.

    The complexity and capabilities of the products has grown substantially. But it has not grown beyond the imagination of what was conceivable by the first early developers, of which I was one of. (I have also never changed jobs, or written one single resume in my life.)

    Does that sort of, kind of count?

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:06AM (#741649)

    I'm playing plenty of ancient games, which are also software.