Found in 1 comment on Hacker News
Annatar · 2016-06-18 · Original thread
> Yes, the kernel Linux has _many_ problems. But without it, we would be living in a much worse world than even the most broken of Linux interfaces and semantics. But GNU/Linux definitely was a saviour for Unix.

Maybe you would be living in a much worse world, if your entire world up to that point in time consisted of Microsoft(R) Windows(R) and an intel based PC tin pail.

I was fine with using a binary only version of Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX; so long as I could get those gratis, along with compilers and software RAID, that was fine by me, as I had no interest in building my own OS at that point in time (unlike now). I also grew up on Commodore computers, where, when one bought a computer, it would come with detailed schematics, and the hardware was documented in detail[1][2].

I can only offer you empathy for the world you grew up in, but that does not give you the right, nor are you correct in assuming, that everyone else lacked the same freedoms you lacked: not everybody grew up in the United States which has fascist copyright laws. The country where I grew up did not have any copyright laws, and if it weren't for that, it would still be in the dark ages of Informatics and computer science, and I would not have ever become a computer professional. Other countries, for example Sweden and Spain, still have lax copyright laws, and thank goodness for that. The point is, don't make the error of assuming that the entire world was mis-fortunate and lacked freedom in this sense.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hardware-Reference-Manual-technical-r...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Amiga-Memory-Kernel-Reference-Manual/...

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