From owner-freebsd-chat Sat May 13 18: 9:58 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from sharmas.dhs.org (c62443-a.frmt1.sfba.home.com [24.0.69.165]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BBBAE37BBBE for ; Sat, 13 May 2000 18:09:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org) Received: (from adsharma@localhost) by sharmas.dhs.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id SAA17203; Sat, 13 May 2000 18:09:34 -0700 Date: Sat, 13 May 2000 18:09:34 -0700 From: Arun Sharma Message-Id: <200005140109.SAA17203@sharmas.dhs.org> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? In-Reply-To: <20000514011612.B16058@happy.checkpoint.com> References: <20000513215350.A6803@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000514011612.B16058@happy.checkpoint.com> Reply-To: adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org.nospam Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org In muc.lists.freebsd.chat, you wrote: > > This is grossly anti-historical. At the time many GNU utilities were > written, the original UNIX utilities were not available in source form > freely. You had to buy a UNIX source license. In other words, it's not > like GNU people didn't like the BSD ls(1), they *couldn't* provide > a free-for-use source of ls(1), and had to write their own. > > Of course, there's an easy way for you to prove me wrong. Please point > out to me a GNU replacement of sendmail, perl, or bind. These are > (some of) large free software projects that *were* available for free use > in source form. Surely the GNU people must've rewritten them all to > release them under the GPL? I entered into the UNIX world in early 90s, so I don't know what happened at the early stages of the GNU project. But certainly, there have been many attempts of GNU-fication of existing code on the grounds that it was non-free. Gnome, GPG and Linux to name a few. Also, having GNU code around hasn't stopped duplication of work. Try counting the number of GPL'ed mail clients on http://freshmeat.net/ -Arun To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message