Messages in this thread | | | From | Richard Stallman <> | Subject | Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers? | Date | Sun, 05 Jan 2003 13:34:01 -0500 |
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Linux is a copy of Unix. There is very little new stuff in Linux.
This is no coincidence. GNU/Linux parallels Unix because I chose that design in 1983. It is foolish to focus on innovation when you are starting a race with a multi-year handicap. The first task is to catch up.
The primary purpose of GNU is the freedom to cooperate. Innovation is nice, but secondary. We followed the design of Unix because that was the most reliable way to produce a working portable system. We made it compatible with Unix so that many users could easily switch to it. We deliberately avoided innovative approaches in many cases--the noteworthy exception being the GNU Hurd. (Perhaps that exception was a bad decision.)
Although innovation is not our primary focus, there is a fair amount of innovation in GNU packages. GNU Emacs is better than any previous Emacs. (The first Emacs was another innovation in our community.) GCC was the first portable truly optimizing compiler, and the first optimizing compiler that supported debugging. Autoconf was an innovation in portability technology. Looking elsewhere in our community, Perl and Python seem to be innovative; the X Window System was too. There are surely more examples that I don't know of.
You get the idea. Sun makes more in 2 days than Red Hat makes all year.
This is very significant if money is your main goal. Both GNU and Linux exist because of people who have different priorities.
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