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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

The end result was that it took
many, many years to produce a test version."See Maui High Performance Computing
Center Speech.
Whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success
of the Linux-kernel team created a tense situation.
Sure, the Linux kernel had been licensed under the GPL,
but as Murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat
Linux as a purely free software operating system was
far from uniform. By late 1993, the total Linux user
population had grown from a dozen or so Minix
enthusiasts to somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.GNU/Linux user-population
numbers are sketchy at best,
which is why I've provided such a broad range. The
100,000 total comes from the Red Hat "Milestones" site,
http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html.
What had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe
for exploitation. Like Winston Churchill watching
Soviet troops sweep into Berlin, Stallman felt an
understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time
to celebrate the Linux "victory.


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