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A comment on Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child & his new laptop. Parent comment

Re:Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child &... by Create on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @03:01AM (#353192)
he's far too dogmatic

This is his curse: and many people reproach him this. His standard reply is, that if he would have ever given way to "compromises" by being less "dogmatic", GNU/Linux would have never happened: it would be infested with proprietary blobs all the way through giving control to others, rather than you, the proprietor, to the detriment of your freedom. Maybe I am wrong, but I tend to agree, if you compare the popularity of GNU/Linux vs. any other Unix, notably the FreeBSD and its variants.

Finally, I like the door knob analogy of Jeremy Allison:

http://twit.tv/floww14

to which e.g. Mark Shuttleworth would also subscribe: this is the only reason for the popularity and explosive growth of Ubuntu. The day this changes (like it did for say RedHat), it will also decline in popularity (completely different than material profit of stakeholders), something a few people already start seeing signs of.

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Re:Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child &... by allenbrunson on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @11:39AM (#353575)
i'm not convinced.

rms has a lot of geek cred due to emacs, gcc, etc. if he'd spent that cred wisely, i think it's reasonable to assume he could have gotten a lot of other programmers to do his bidding, and gnu hurd would now be the kernel of choice, rather than linux.

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