G is for GNU

[@wayne_taylor]

I’m really enjoying this video series. Thank you for taking the time to put these together. Amazing work.

[@TheGeoffable]

Whilst waiting for my partner's delayed train, in her VW car, and with no mobile signal and nothing good on the radio, I started digging around in the depths of the car menus. Sure enough, under something like "other->legal->credits->bewareLeopards" was a whole bunch of GPL licence credits.

[@AzureFlash]

"It might seem a little odd to have a project that's named after what it isn't" WINE: 😅

[@pierrecolin6376]

>stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" >looks like it stands for "WINdows Emulator"

[@chri-k]

--the proper capitalisation is Wine--

[@EilonwyWanderer]

See also LAME -- LAME Ain't an MPEG Encoder!

[@andyhall7032]

my fav is still less is more

[@ChadGeidel]

While I don’t actually want to watch a 5 hour video about rms, I think the next series could focus on people in computing. I know you’ve touched on some of them already, but it would be cool to put faces to some of the critical innovations in our field.

[@GnuReligion]

I think he visibly cringed at the mention of RMS, and is ashamed of him. An "The Outlaws of Tech" series is an idea. John McAfee has to be prominent.

[@dragonfly-7]

Dylan - you are the man ! 02:04 ... 02:35 is the very best abstract about "rms" I ever heard. Amazing your non-contradicting phrasing on somebody rather contradicting ... 😉🤭😊

[@georgeprout42]

I'd often have pub conversations with a dearly missed friend about both woodworking (Rout-er) and his LAN (Route-er ). That's what we agreed on anyway, as both then fit the English definitions of the verbs "rout" and "route".

[@Zeutomehr]

3:50 actually, the freedoms originally started at 1! Freedom 0 wasn't part of the freedoms originally, because it was taken for granted, but later added explicitly

[@subtlewolf]

... because hackers also happen to be sci-fi nerds.

[@Levi_OP]

This is the most high-quality and engaging software history video I've watched in a looooong time. It's clear that you know what you're talking about. I'll certainly subscribe and plan to watch many more of your videos that I'm already being recommended.

[@willemvdk4886]

I absolutely love this series, Dylan! Good job!

[@theDarthFader42]

I had no idea that OpenWRT started with *THE* Linksys router. Very cool.

[@LaMirah]

5:23 If you did not count the BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution, which was already available and self-hosting and even free-er, just embroiled in a legal battle, which it won a bit too late to forestall the Linux kernel.

[@menachemsalomon]

As succinct histories of GNU go, that was quite nicely done. Thanks. And, BTW, I like your sign off. Take care of yourself, too. A comment on pronunciation: The traffic reporters on my local stations say _route_ like _root,_ so that's what I'm accustomed to. But for _router,_ the people I've worked mostly used the wider /ou/ as in _out._ It's inconsistent, but so's much of English so :shrug:. Have fun in Utrecht. Me, I'm stuck in what used to be New Utrecht, and there are two streets in my neighborhood that still bear the name.

[@GnuReligion]

There is a great religious debate on whether the "G" in Gnu should be silent. I default to the most pretentious way to say things. Can't go wrong.

[@flamewingsonic]

I just noticed that the title of this video is a lot more literal than those of the other videos - it literally describes what the G in GNU stands for.

[@danielrhouck]

15:16 Nothing about GPL says you canʼt also offer an alternate license, *if* youʼre the copyright holder. But anyone who contributed to Wordpress without a CLA would have also had to GPL their code, and *they* could then sue.

[@Parker8752]

I have encountered a few projects licensed that way; you can use the code under the GPL, or you can pay for a commercial license.

[@danielrhouck]

@Parker8752 Yeah, exactly. And I think the AGPL is even more that, at least in practice?

[@PaulBennett]

Curiously, Bell Labs also has a great "jailbreaking a closed source printer" origin story adjacent to the birth of Unix itself.

[@Ratstail91]

I've always used the zlib license, personally. It's simple, straight forward, and doesn't yell at you in uppercaps like MIT.

[@MOOBBreezy]

First time watching this channel, glad this showed up in my feed. Really enjoyed the video, will watch the rest!

[@cokert3]

If you like this sort of content, search his name - Dylan’s a prolific speaker at dev conferences and most (all?) of his talks are online on the various conference channels. Every single one is great!

[@logiciananimal]

Wonderful work, as usual. Years ago I read a book on cases and legal analysis of the various open source licenses and I could have sworn that some more had been tested in court - maybe just not GNU? Also, being Canadian, finding a Canadian equivalent to this text would be interesting, but as far as I can tell there is even less case law here. Of course, I am not a lawyer, so maybe I am just missing something.

[@mrtnsnp]

And then there is xnu, the Apple kernel for Darwin and macOS. And yes, the acronym is recursive, if Wikipedia is accurate here.

[@cod3r1337]

I owned half a dozen of those Linksys routers over the years, they were real fun toys to play with. Ah, good times :) These days of course, RPi and Arduino eat WRT for breakfast.

[@pendarischneider]

On the naming of GNU - From the talk I can appreciated the AWK name may not have been the first choice, but there is a UNIX tradition of animal names as acronyms, e.g., AWK (named for its creators), and YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler). The trend has continued (maybe it helps to have a nice animal for the book cover), newer examples I can think of, include Swift (named after the bird?, yet another C child) & LLaMA (Large LAnguage Model Meta Ai). There are many other, and, I'm sure, more will come.

[@PauxloE]

13:55 "If any of these projects had been published under the GNU general public license, they wouldn't have been able to change their licensing terms." - Not quite correct. You can not "unrelease" existing releases under the GPL (or whatever license they were under), but if you own the copyright (e.g. by the means of CLAs signed by all contributors), you can license new releases (and even release older ones) under whatever other license you want. The GPL only helps against this if the maintainer accepts contributions without a CLA transferring ownership (which makes it a software owned by many people). Even then, if you can track down all the contributors (or their heirs) and get their consent, you can also do that change. (It also helps against someone else, who is not the owner, re-releasing it with different terms.) And of course anyone can take the last "free" release and fork it - which is also what happened with these projects, even though they are not GPL.

[@rlamacraft]

Yeah, I think Dylan got a bit confused, or didn't make sufficiently clear in the script, between projects that are released under GPL and those that also depend on other GPL code. The use of CLAs also complicates things because by keeping the IP with one organisation you can feasibly change the licensing that wouldn't be possible with projects like GNU. It's all very complicated to get right

Re-release of code own by many people under different license did happen - it was for example the case with parts of Git code (under GPLv2 license) re-licensed and ported to Java under EPL license as JGit.

[@ArifGhostwriter]

Sub'd! This was of a level of quality on par with Explaining Computers.

[@kaiserruhsam]

hey now, we'd watch the 5 hour rms video

[@cod3r1337]

About the German court case, it should be noted that German IP laws work fundamentally different from their US counterparts. Technically, "copyright" as such doesn't really exist under German law. Instead, there is "Urheberrecht" (~= "author's rights/law"). It basically postulates that intellectual ownership of someone's work will ALWAYS remain with that person (and their legal heirs, up to a tome), is not transferable and can't be waived. Only permission to use a work can be granted to third parties by contract. This contrasts with US copyright, which can be transferred or waived. So in a very strict sense, "public domain" under German law can only ever apply to works where the author has passed away, and there are no heirs or their claimse have expired. This may sound like an abstract, nitpicky, legalese distinction, but has implications when trying to use German court rulings as a template for legal interpretation of license agreements in different legal frameworks.

[@teskio999]

Look after each other ❤

[@Stoney_Eagle]

Maybe you can do a video about the impact of MIT in hardware and software 😊

[@george-vhs]

I absolutely vote for a video on rms !!!! even if it is a 5 hour one 😂!!!!

[@andyhall7032]

"free as in beer vs free as in speech" ( I'm sure we all remember than one )

[@DylanBeattie]

@@andyhall7032 free as in puppy!

[@calrogman]

Freedom zero is unique among the four freedoms in that it is the freedom granted to users. The other freedoms are for developers.

[@rlzr.]

Strategical comment and I am back to watch!

[@michaeltrillium]

Now I’m also very upset about the missed perfection that would have been Xinu!

[@TobyLegion]

Should have been the 11 essential freedoms.

[@ThomasRobinson-c8j]

Appreciate the detailed breakdown! Could you help me with something unrelated: I have a SafePal wallet with USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?

[@ericmyrs]

I would pay quite a bit of money to watch Matt Mullenweg sue himself over WordPress.

[@ArifGhostwriter]

🇬🇧 👍🏽 November 2024 What an awesome essay! N.B. You're a Brit, of a level of intelligence concomitant with that fact - so - 'rowter' can only ever be referring to a carpentry tool!

[@BluetonicUK28]

Hey Dylan, are you going to be live streaming advent of code this year? I hope so. Let us know :)

[@MonochromeWench]

Various projects changing their licensees has me become really sceptical of any project that does not use an OSI approved license but claims to be open source (often it seems to be you can look at the source code and make changes if you contribute back the changes but you are not allowed to do anything else with the code, so really just crowd sourced bug fixing not at all in the spirit of open source). The Wordpress problem is why licenses like AGPL were created to force networked service providers to share their modified sources with their users/customers. Not a fan of AGPL myself even though it solves an obvious problem, I just don't like licenses that have poor compatibility with other widely used open source licenses.

[@LeeSmith-cf1vo]

The biggest thing I don't understand about the GPL and similar licences is how licence changes work. I've seen it happen a few times where a project had changed from one free licence to another or even to a proprietary licence, and I just don't understand how that works. The terms of the GPL would seem to forbid it? Also I actually wasn't aware that software running on top of Linux also has to be open sourced if you plan to sell it as part of an appliance. I mean, if you directly modify the kernel - sure! Maybe any kernel modules too. But software? (Maybe I misunderstood, but the whole linksys section at least implied that it was more than just the drivers that were affected)

[@tovc]

It's really funny to me that, in an alphabetical series about computer acronyms, the letter 'G' in 'GNU' doesn't actually mean anything, and could be any letter

[@StenIsaksson]

C is for cookie, it's all I ever need.

[@ProgrammingRainbow]

Gnu is from "The Gnu Song" its not a random letter. Gnu is a wildebeest. They even use it as their mascot. You kind of missed this entirely. Richard Stallman liked Jame Thurber and also the Gnu or wildebeest.

[@DylanBeattie]

@ProgrammingRainbow Quoting rms’ speech at NYU, May 2001: “So I looked for a recursive acronym for Something is not UNIX. And I tried all 26 letters, and discovered that none of them was a word. Hmm, try another way. I made a contraction. That way I could have a three-letter acronym, for Something's not UNIX. And I tried letters, and I came across the word "GNU" -- the word "GNU" is the funniest word in the English language. [Laughter] That was it.” www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

[@benholroyd5221]

Christ. I started using Linux in 06. I've been using Linux for half its history, and my beard has started going grey, I'm not quite at the point of arranging my program so the next instruction is under the drum head... yet.

[@DylanBeattie]

@@benholroyd5221 …you mean you’re still using separate constants? 😧

[@bauckrob]

Also, GNU is a pun, since "gnu" is pronounced like "new". But puns tend to work best inside the same language speakers. The pun-ness was probably lost by the first person who read about it.

[@m4rt_]

GNU is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX is not UNIX...

[@alejandromedina1019]

acktualllyyyy....

[@Bozebo]

GNU Terry Pratchett

[@edgeeffect]

I think you've missed out a few things on your list of stuff MIT gave us... but, if you had included the full list, you'd be quite out of breath and we'd have another 5 hour video that contradicted itself on our hands. ;) Avoiding the (shall we say) "complexities" of talking about RMS... there's another can of worms waiting to be opened the moment you say "Eric Raymond" too. ;)

[@gunarcom]

S is for Stallman part 43.5...

[@Julkkis1980]

Ah. Good old times. I think i stopped at least half a dozen GPL-licensed libraries being incorporated because of The rather "sticky" nature into our multi-million code row software.

[@DontKnowDontCare]

I'd like to interject for a moment....

[@xurtis]

xnu strangely is unix

[@niceEli]

Gnu = (((((((((Gnu Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix) Not Unix

[@hendy643]

where's the base case???? lol.

[@GnuReligion]

The Gnu tools would run on a PC with Minix, without memory protection, and just floppies. Compiling a driver was a frustrating exercise. I remember Sparcs with BSD, running gcc/X. God bless the i386. Its semi-open architecture is the host body that the GPL used to infect the world.

[@harrkev]

Sallman is great! I love that guy.

[@DylanBeattie]

🙃

[@thezipcreator]

I hope you're not serious. (if you are, please see the appendix of the open letter to remove RMS from the board of directors of the FSF)

[@DarkorthAurelius]

@@thezipcreator Thank you, I didn't know and a quick google of RMS himself didn't produce the open letter

[@creativeb549]

Hey, respect Stallman :P he's a nice boy

[@thezipcreator]

don't exactly know how being misogynist, ableist, and transphobic qualifies as "nice", but alright.

[@gwaptiva]

A router is someone that runs away in fear; a router is something that ensures that something arrives at the correct destination. Please remain a Zim that lives in the UK and speak properly :)

[@DylanBeattie]

No, a router is the victorious force that routs its enemy... routing is the act of causing somebody to run away in fear, not the act of running away itself. When I'm paying attention, router-rhymes-with-shouter is the woodworking tool and router-rhymes-with-hooter is navigation and networking. But some bit of my brain has latched onto pronouncing "wireless router" to rhyme with "shouter" and occasionally throws it up when I'm tired. I don't think it matters very much unless we are in the very specific situation where we're building a lovely wooden cabinet in which to install some networking equipment and I ask you to pass me the router without specifying whether I meant the router or the the router.

[@paulabraham2550]

@@DylanBeattie Quite. gwaptiva was defining a routee. 🙂

[@gwaptiva]

@@paulabraham2550 not quite, in tabletop wargaming we used the term to refer to the routing unit, but I'll admit that's rather niche and probably impure usage

[@ThatRobHuman]

​@@DylanBeattie fun fact: here in New Jersey, we use both pronunciations - the difference is if it's a proper noun. When you want to drive from location A to B, you could take several routes (like "shouts") or one route (like "shout") might be better than another this time of day, but your best bet might be to take [the highway called] Route 287 (like "root")

[@paulabraham2550]

@@gwaptiva I wouldn't object to that - I was being flippant. And "routee" is most certainly "impure usage"!

[@igfoobar]

G is for "Richard Stallman is a far-left jerk."

[@mangocane8977]

How?

[@chrismarkhill]

If you ask any Australian IT pro how to pronounce ‘router’, they’ll have a view. One version produces understanding, the other, sniggers.

[@cod3r1337]

I assume Aussies use British style for that, am I right?