MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges

Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by pc86 on Monday September 11, 2017 @08:52AM (#15218106)

If you think it's likely that we have great minds flipping burgers now, it stands to reason there were minds greater than Jobs, Gates, etc (RMS? really?) flipping burgers then, too.

I've seen this sentiment expressed before and it always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of "kids these days!" without much merit.

Some people will waste their talent. Some people won't.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by jdietrich on Monday September 11, 2017 @09:01AM (#15218146)

>RMS? really?

The dude wrote EMACS, GNU, GCC and the GPL license. He more or less single-handedly invented the concept of Free software. If RMS isn't a genius, then I don't know who is.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by snakeanus on Monday September 11, 2017 @10:51AM (#15218930)

He also played a big part in ITS, the lisp machines and published multiple papers on Lisp, AI, and CS. Unlike Jobs and Gates he made actual contributions to the whole field.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by AlphaSite on Monday September 11, 2017 @10:47AM (#15218898)

I’m fairly certain OSS predates him by a reasonable margin.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by dublinben on Monday September 11, 2017 @11:19AM (#15219136)

You'd be wrong. The Free Software movement predates the "Open Source" movement by 15 years or so.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by eropple on Monday September 11, 2017 @11:53AM (#15219439)

The BSD license predates the GPLv1.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by throwaway2048 on Monday September 11, 2017 @01:29PM (#15220313)

GNU as an organization pushing the idea of free software long predates the GPL. The people creating the BSD licensed BSD NET/2 explicitly aknowledged the GNU influence on their decision to release.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by wrs on Monday September 11, 2017 @03:30PM (#15221498)

He started the free software "movement" to _preserve_ the existing ethos of software sharing at MIT and elsewhere, which he saw as being destroyed by corporate influence.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by mrgordon on Monday September 11, 2017 @01:43PM (#15220443)

You're comparing Gates with his poor quality virusware to RMS who has written incomparably important parts of the Unix operating system and made it free for all. Then you decide to act like RMS is the one that doesn't belong in the list. LOL

The core code of Unix will live on long past the current incarnation of Windows.

Gates is a ruthless business man and thats the only reason his name is larger in your mind. His most striking quote was about how you give Windows licenses for free to Africa so they get addicted and have to keep buying it even though they can't afford it and Unix is free due to familiarity. Meanwhile RMS labored quietly to build a better world.

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Re:MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms ... by snakeanus on Monday September 11, 2017 @10:47AM (#15218889)

> RMS? really?

Yes, Jobs and Gates can't even compare to him.

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