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Comment by airforce1 | Hacker News Reader

I mean yeah he's famous, but has he actually made anything useful or interesting? I did a quick search and it seems like his main claim to fame is copyleft activism/zealotry as well as some obscure OS I've never heard of called "GNU Project" which, as far as I can tell, nobody uses (presumably because it is in the same vein as TempleOS).

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...GNU provides pretty much the entire userspace on a standard Linux setup. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GNU_packages for a list of software that's part of GNU; just a few examples are bash, coreutils (cat, ls, mv, rm, etc.), gcc, glibc (the C standard library used on most Linux systems), GIMP, and emacs.

Most of linux's userland is GNU, including the well-used bash,gcc,grep,tar,ls,etc (it's why he rather annoyingly insists on people calling it GNU/linux). So to say nobody uses it is very, very false. Nobody uses the GNU kernel HURD, which is what you're thinking of.

That being said, he's a very eccentric person and his contributions to computing in the last 20ish years have been minimal. GCC has been losing market share to llvm and bash to zsh/fish. You could also argue that had he never created GNU, BSD would be where linux is today and we'd be just as well, if not better, off.

I honestly can't tell if you're joking. GNU software comprises a large amount of most major OSs with the Linux kernel.

Have you heard of the numerous projects licensed under the GPL? Stallman personally worked on Emacs, GCC, and GDB.

well the linux kernel is compiled with the gnu compiler project, so literally everyone uses it if they connect to the internet or have an android phone.

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