Although Murdock had been accommodating on political
issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the
design and development model of the actual software.
What had begun as a show of solidarity soon became of
model of other GNU projects.
"I can tell you that I've had my share of disagreements
with him," says Murdock with a laugh. "In all honesty
Richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with."
In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue,
decided to hand over the reins of the growing Debian
project. He had already been ceding management duties
to Bruce Perens, the hacker best known for his work on
Electric Fence, a Unix utility released under the GPL.
Perens, like Murdock, was a Unix programmer who had
become enamored of GNU/Linux as soon as the program's
Unix-like abilities became manifest. Like Murdock,
Perens sympathized with the political agenda of
Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, albeit from afar.
"I remember after Stallman had already come out with
the GNU Manifesto, GNU Emacs, and GCC, I read an
article that said he was working as a consultant for
Intel," says Perens, recalling his first brush with
Stallman in the late 1980s.
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