I’ve tried using my incredible (british) brain using Google to see if these open source titans ever engaged in a battle of “friendly conversation” with one another.
I was always interested what Stallman thought of the angry but smart finnish man who gave us the robust penguin kernel that breathes life into older machines and powers supercomputers for the weather.
The same with Torvalds thoughts on Stallmans GNU involvement and him as a person.
This is because you sometimes had different organisations in the FOSS and OSS community that take on different meanings so I wanted a better idea if these chaps ever spoke in an interview together.
TLDR : Does finnish man like bearded GNU jesus man and the same vice versa
Stallman’s attempt to rename Linux to incorporate the GNU name not happening was frustrating on his end it seems. Everytime someone calls their system a Linux based OS and not GNU/Linux based OS downplays the work he put in. However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated. It’s said Stallman is a visionary, while Linus is a programist. While there’s never been any display of tension in a back and forth between them online, it’s always seemed to me they appreciate and also despise various aspects of each another.
Quite the opposite.
GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.
Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.
Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.