Which company or individual can sponsor me on a summer trip to Europe?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 10:51:35AM +0300, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On 7/6/2014 10:50 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> >Anyway, the GPLv3 or whatever licence the GNU sub-projects have
> >does not prevent me from using GNU software, so that's it.
> The interesting point is that outside of a relatively small group of
> developers project GNU has no bearing on anything. Free (as in beer)
> software existed long before RMS, open source software, including
> operating systems, existed long before Linux, or even BSD. And it
> continues to exist long after.
> 
> I doubt that anyone one this list, or any other list for that
> matter, runs 100% GPL licensed software on their computers. They may
> be running only free and open source software, but I am sure some of
> it has a BSD type, or other license.

The GNU system was intended to include X11 and TeX, so I doubt it if
that was actually a goal.

> 
> So to answer the question someone posed, would we be running the
> same thing as we are now if RMS never existed? Probably not.
> Something very close, YES. Would LINUX have existed? Maybe. Maybe
> Linus would have spent his time improving the free. open source, BSD
> instead. We actually may have been doing better because a lot of
> time and effort was spent in the 1990's producing GPL'ed version of
> BSD utilites that could have been spent elsewhere.

There wasn't that much good BSD code out there when the GNU project
started. BSD started provided a complete system at the beginning of the
1990-s. And shortly thereafter it got into a trial with AT&T. Also
shortly after development was halted and much of it moved to proprietary
forks. By then the basic system for Linux to use (sans kernel) was GNU.

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