Comment by mghackerlady
5 hours ago
Without Stallman there wouldn't be GNU, so the operating system used to host this site and the majority of the web wouldn't exist. The compiler used to build that operating system wouldn't exist. The free software movement that later birthed its little cousin "open source" wouldn't exist, neither would the free culture movement to some extent. The ideals of the free software movement inspired the architects of the World Wide Web to make it a freely available technology, so without stallman the net would be vastly different, likely staying fragmented between different protocols like it used to be. Plus, the operating system you're using likely has some GNU stuff in it somewhere
Most of that is incorrect and revisionist history. The Web was developed on a commercial system (the NExT from Steve Job’s company) and initial implementations were made on various commercial systems by differing groups. Even today, Linux is at most 50% of the web servers on the Internet.
It's not revisionist. The entire NeXT codebase was literally compiled with GCC.
There's even a funny story in there about how NeXT almost bypassed the GPL until GNU got Lawyers involved since them using a loophole would be very bad for peoples freedom
Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances
> Linux is at most 88 percent of servers, since windows is only estimated to be used on 11% of servers and the other unices aren't used outside of very specific circumstances
I wanted to comment on this. Please correct me if I am wrong as I used LLM sources to find
So from what I can find (from human searches) was that https://commandlinux.com/statistics/linux-web-server-market-... Linux is indeed ~55%
But the other thing is that some servers (from Chatgpt, I am not gonna lie) it says that there's an Unknown/CDN servers around 20 or more% (I feel like its more) to then reach the ~88% data estimate in some sense.
So can someone please clarify me on this if this is the true case or not?
It was developed on a proprietary system (free software can be commercial) and yes, various implementations were made on said proprietary systems, but there were always free ones like lynx (the oldest browser still in development). Plus, Tim Berners-Lee was likely inspired by the GNU and BSD projects when he made the protocol royalty free