Re: Where is old "info su" which had RMS comment ??
On Tuesday 24 September 2002 11:06, Ben Collins wrote:
> > Ahh, so GNU su is less secure because Richard Stallman, in his infinite
> > wisdom, believes security is a bad thing and that any lowlife h4x0r
> > should be able to gain root priveleges and trash the system. This
> > explains so much about the GNU philosophy that I am overwhelmed by its
> > greatness!
>
> You have to also understand that this was written probably 15 years ago,
> when the Internet was but a dot on the h4x0r scope, who were mainly on
> BBS's.
>
> His comments were based on a political system in large businesses and
> universities, where control of the mainframe (not random shoebox-sized
> computers running quake servers) was a power play.
>
> It's a different world now...
Indeed.
Richard's beliefs about passwords come from his backround. The movie about
the growth of open source and linux ("Open Sources"?) has a section about
this. Basically in the beginning everyone who had access had full access.
Then a group of people started locking people out and preventing them from
working in the style they were accustomed. Stallman was dismayed by this and
saw it as an attempt to gain power and control people. It took the Internet
boom of the nineties to bring gnu.org machines out of Stallman's 1970's
beliefs. At the FSF his password is still common knowledge.
Keep in mind that the people working on the software now (and for the last
5+years) have not shared Stallman's views. In fact on this front very few
people ever did.
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