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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: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 28 2018, @04:54PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday September 28 2018, @04:54PM (#741415) Journal

    I am not aware of any successful means of insulating scientific and engineering projects from political influence

    Well, that's easy: Just make sure the project is done by a single person, and has no success whatsoever.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Friday September 28 2018, @05:34PM

    by chromas (34) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 28 2018, @05:34PM (#741439) Journal

    TempleOS by Terry A. Davis. The CIA niggers finally got him.