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Forty Years of Commitment to Software Freedom

posted by hubie on Tuesday September 30, @02:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the for-decades-for-freedoms-for-all-users dept.

canopic jug writes:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) turns forty on October 4, 2025. The Free Software Foundation will have then been defending the rights of all software users for the past 40 years. The long term goal is for all users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share software.

There will be an online event, with an in-person option for those that can get to Boston. In November there will also be a hackathon.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday September 30, @05:25PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday September 30, @05:25PM (#1419077) Journal

    Before Linux existed, a class I took as an undergrad had us working on Minix. I didn't like it. Thought it was super lame that we had to use this "split" utility to break a source code file into small enough pieces so that the text editor could handle it without running out of memory. In the early 1990s, I had several flavors of DOS, I tried OS/2 (3.0 Warp), and Linux when it was on version 1.3. What broke things for me permanently as far as commercial software was concerned was OS/2 not having networking included, and the terrible bugs in the Borland C++ compiler. Any program that tried to use more than 64K, Borland C++ would screw up by assigning the same 64K segment to what should have been different segments. Massive memory corruption that the OS couldn't see. I switched to gcc, on Linux, and never looked back.

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  • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday September 30, @08:59PM

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 30, @08:59PM (#1419119) Journal

    I didn't like it. Thought it was super lame that we had to use this "split" utility to break a source code file into small enough pieces so that the text editor could handle it without running out of memory.

    That was because of the 64k segments on the 16-bit PeeCee architecture? In those days, the 386 was very expensive and apparently coding for it was "very hard" mainly, I think, because people preferred to keep working code secret rather than publish and share it, and page tables were fancy mainframe things.