<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:20B500CB-5491-4590-84BB-0E0D760FDC97@icloud.com"
type="cite">
<div>
<div style="direction: ltr;"><span
style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">But your, Geoff,
incendiary remarks re RMS, are quite out of place. RMS'
laudable stance on BDS is quite irrelevant to this list, in
my opinion.</span></div>
<br>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br>
Incendiary or not, his actions did have an effect upon the FOSS
community.<br>
<br>
Besides any direct effect in relation to RMS , the FSS and project
GNU, which is debatable, it caused Larry Ellison, who is a big
supporter of Israel in general and Sderot in particular to look
elsewhere for his open source aspirations. <br>
<br>
By the time Oracle bought SUN, Solaris had become almost another
Linux distro. It included the SUN UNIX Kernel, and a lot of SUN
proprietary stuff, but more than half of it was project GNU
software. You could see that the intention was to replace the UNIX
code with the GNU alternatives. SUN also released a copy of their
UNIX code as open source, but not under GNU for legal reasons (most
of it was already under BSD license).<br>
<br>
So Oracle dropped the open source Solaris version, it still exists,
but there is very little interest or support for it, and the GNU
code is slowly being replaced with non open source UNIX code or BSD
code.<br>
<br>
BUT the biggest effect was that Open Office, which was supposed to
be given to the FSF to help them replace their editor with something
useful, never happened.<br>
<br>
Instead it went to the Apache Foundation and has been released under
their BSDish license.<br>
<br>
So Marc, his actions may have been laudable or not, and my comments
may have been incendiary or not, but in the end it means that we are
even more so stuck with that f'ing editor. :-(<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson 4X1GM/N3OWJ
Jerusalem Israel.</pre>
</body>
</html>