Well, yes and no, the VMS heritage is larger to be sure but key portions of the kernel multi-tasking were brought over from Xenix, which was based on Unix licensing from AT&T. Similarly, OSX is technically based on Mach as much as BSD.
But you’re missing my point that virtually all of the “non-free” options nowadays have significant roots in things that were either free to begin with, or became free, or were derived from free.
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Pro Tip: Once you hit 40, they want you to sign a piece of paper waiving your rights under age-discrimination laws, and they need a carrot to make you do it. Also, oddly you’re way more likely to find yourself in a position of them wanting you to sign something like that after you’re over 40. Funny, that. Even in the original dot-com boom, though, I got pretty lucky getting laid off with severance.
You’re right that there is a lot more variability in smaller companies. Success and being beholden to a VC, though, are like a perfect storm for producing sociopathic working environments, though.
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Thanks for the law review Judge Roy Moore.
Older folks should keep their paws off of the youngsters. Give them a change to finish growing up first.
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The best way I’ve heard it described is, in the late 90s, NeXT acquired Apple for negative dollars.
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Ima steal that! 
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A Unix source license was $20,000 ($200 for an educational version). It wasn’t free in either sense. System III could be sub-licensed as a binary for $100.
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I’m over 40 
I’m kind of convinced that all work is a sociopathic endeavor. Perhaps I’m a wee bit jaded by all of it.
The most useful bit is GCC, and LLVM is slowly overtaking it. Linux itself isn’t GNU even though it uses the license make famous by GNU and FSF. A few other things like make and binutils are useful for putting together a Unix-like system, but alternatives are available.
For the lovers of Linux, Ubuntu, and Debian there is not much option. Drink the Kool-Aid® or go home.
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Yeah, about Ol’ Allen. The one time I met him I was underage. I didn’t realize he was hitting on me until the girl I went to the reading with started growing fangs and jaguar fur. Then it dawned on me. The guy was an expert at flattering and creeping on boys. Decades later I found out he had tried to do the same thing to the then 14-15 year old son of a good friend. The friend put the arm on him, took him off to a corner and explained that he would personally kill and gut Ginsburg if he said one more word. Knowing my friend that was not an idle threat.
Allen Ginsburg may have been a great poet. He was also a skeevy kiddy-fucker.
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I guess now its okay to enable the wheel group in Linux.
Have you got nothing better to post about?
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@beschizza, your article doesn’t simply report on the mischaracterization of Stallman’s remarks; it actually perpetuates it. I’m talking specifically about the part where you write that Stallman was “suggeting [sic] victims of Jeffrey Epstein were willing participants”. That is absolutely not what he suggested; what you (and most other news outlets covering the story) leave out from your summary are the words “presented as”. Someone acting under coercion or duress may certainly present themselves as a willing participant to third parties, which is what Stallman was speculating was the case with this particular victim. (And it’s not like there is no precedent for such a scenario, Natascha Kampusch and Jaycee Dugard being notable examples of enslaved youths who did not arouse any suspicion on the rare occasions when they interacted with members of the public.) Somewhat bizarrely, you do quote the “presented as” bit elsewhere in the article, which makes me wonder whether you bothered reading it through before summarizing it.
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Exactly! People are talking about the old boys network almost as if it is something organized with secret handshakes and member dues, rather than just the tendency to allow (old white) men more forgiveness in their working life.
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Yep. To think that RMS hasn’t benefited from his gender and race is absurd. Of course he has.
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The distinction does not change the remark’s character. “Presented herself as willing” is as inappropriate a speculation as “was willing” given the things done to the victims, the publishing context, Stallman’s association with MIT and with the alleged abuser, and his own past of gross remarks about women and childen.
That objection, which seems to you to be a clear and cutting one, gets little purchase outside of “elite nerd” spaces online. Is it because everyone is too stupid to understand words? Is it because everyone writing about it is a commercial or political operator, variously naive, cynical or indifferent? Or is it … something else?
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The Csail e-mail chain is available for everyone to read in the Motherboard article, you know. With his usual contempt for those who dare question him (including those enablers who, as always, are more worried that he might hurt himself with his crappy behaviour toward others), Stallman obviously twists himself into victim-blaming and semantics-gaming and pseudo-legalistic knots to defend Minsky against the allegations. That’s clear to any reader with a shred of empathy for rape victims, even those unfamiliar the larger context of Stallman’s own nasty and creepy behaviour and attitudes toward women.
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“This particular victim” is named Virginia Giuffre. Stallman decided to speculate about what happened to Giuffre instead of listening to her about what happened to her. She should be listened to, and Stallman’s speculation works as a way of silencing her. Now, thanks to Stallman, thousands of neckbeards can say “oh, she looked like she wanted it, so Minsky is innocent”, rather than believe Virginia Giuffre when she says Minsky assaulted her. When it comes to her sexual assault, Giuffre’s voice matters infinitely more than Stallman’s. Frankly, he has absolutely no business publicly speculating about what happened to her.
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Honestly the “presenting herself” part just makes it worse, because it signals an interest in a peculiar situational behavior of victims that creates an incentive to abusers.
“He wasn’t suggesting she wanted it. He was suggesting she was asking for it.”
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The distinction does not change the remark’s character. “Presented herself as willing” is as inappropriate a speculation as “was willing” given the things done to the victims, the publishing context,
The original context here is a conversation in which Stallman and others are discussing the nature of Minsky’s involvement with Giuffre—in particular, how much Minsky himself knew about the circumstances Giuffre was in and, consequently, to what extent he was complicit in the crime. Whether or not Giuffre made any indication to Minsky that she was being coerced is certainly germane to that discussion. (Mind you, Stallman does not say that Minsky should be exonerated in the event that he was ignorant of the coercion.) I understand how his speculation could be taken as, or could actually be, disrepectful to Giuffre; after all, she is still around and could conceivably be asked to give her own account of the encounters with Minsky. To Stallman’s credit, in the e-mail thread he asks for a copy of her deposition, which he had until then not had access to, so that he can educate himself on this point. The leaked thread ends there so it’s not clear whether he received and read the deposition and whether it changed his understanding of the events. (FWIW, I doubt it did, since the portions of the deposition mentioning Minsky don’t go into a lot of detail.)
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That depends on whether you like the “it came from space” theory. Or whether you think the kernel alone constitutes the operating system, without the linker, compiler, shells, c library, coreutils, etc etc.
