Posted by: observer222
on January 26, 2006 05:08 AM
Third, Debian and the FSF *need each other* very much
Nobody needs Debian. Debian is a fine distro, and the Debian project contributes a lot of useful work to the community. But there are other distros. If Debian had never existed, we'd still have free software.
If the FSF had never existed, we would not have free software. It's as simple as that. Linus has always acknowledged the contribution of the GNU project.
(OK, we'd have had BSD Unix. But their license does nothing to protect our freedom. No BSD variant could ever beat Microsoft, for example, because if it looked like doing so, Microsoft would just take it, add some trivial improvements/incompatibilities, and sell the result as proprietary, closed-source software under some such name as "Windows 2010". Hasn't Apple done more or less that?)
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Re:Debian & FSF
Posted by: observer222 on January 26, 2006 05:08 AMNobody needs Debian. Debian is a fine distro, and the Debian project contributes a lot of useful work to the community. But there are other distros. If Debian had never existed, we'd still have free software.
If the FSF had never existed, we would not have free software. It's as simple as that. Linus has always acknowledged the contribution of the GNU project.
(OK, we'd have had BSD Unix. But their license does nothing to protect our freedom. No BSD variant could ever beat Microsoft, for example, because if it looked like doing so, Microsoft would just take it, add some trivial improvements/incompatibilities, and sell the result as proprietary, closed-source software under some such name as "Windows 2010". Hasn't Apple done more or less that?)
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