"I wrote him asking how he
could be advocating free software on the one hand and
working for Intel on the other. He wrote back saying,
`I work as a consultant to produce free software.' He
was perfectly polite about it, and I thought his answer
made perfect sense."
As a prominent Debian developer, however, Perens
regarded Murdock's design battles with Stallman with
dismay. Upon assuming leadership of the development
team, Perens says he made the command decision to
distance Debian from the Free Software Foundation. "I
decided we did not want Richard's style of
micro-management," he says.
According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the
decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave
it some time to cool off and sent a message that we
really needed a relationship. He requested that we call
it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was
fine. I made the decision unilaterally. Everybody
breathed a sigh of relief."
Over time, Debian would develop a reputation as the
hacker's version of Linux, alongside Slackware, another
popular distribution founded during the same 1993-1994
period.
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