March 2002
Beginner
240 pages
6h 19m
English
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Chapter 7. A Stark Moral Choice
On September 27, 1983, computer programmers logging on to the Usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. Posted in the small hours of the morning, 12:30 a.m. to be exact, and signed by rms@mit-oz, the message’s subject line was terse but attention-grabbing. “New UNIX implementation,” it read. Instead of introducing a newly released version of Unix, however, the message’s opening paragraph issued a call to arms:
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.1
To an experienced Unix developer, the message was a mixture of idealism and hubris. Not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already mature Unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in places. The new GNU system, the author predicted, would carry all the usual components—a text editor, a shell program to run Unix-compatible applications, a compiler, “and a few other things.”1 It would also contain many enticing features that other Unix systems didn’t yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the Lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built according to MIT’s internal networking system.
“GNU will be able to run Unix programs, but will not be identical to Unix,” the author wrote. “We will make all improvements ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.