Happy birthday GNU! from Stephen Fry, one my all-time favorite Brits, right after Charles Darwin, and this next guy,
Glyn Moody, who provides the backstory, a must read short history of free/libre software.
click for video linkStephen Fry is famously a huge Mac fan. I've seen the footage of him clearing out entire Apple stores! Here's Moody:
In founding his GNU project, Stallman was trying to recreate the lost paradise of MIT as he had experienced it as a young hacker, where everybody had shared their code. He was hoping to achieve this, by transposing an even older tradition of collaboration - that of science – to the world of computers. In the process he wanted to give back coding freedoms that had been lost as commerce had reared its head in academia.... One of Stallman's many insights was that science flourished because it was based on sharing discoveries so that others could build on them, without needing to re-invent the wheel.... The closing of software meant that it was impossible to do this, since the last thing that corporate owners of that code wanted to do was to make it freely available. Stallman's idea was to create a movement that would contribute code to the computing community just as scientists contribute knowledge.
