[Gllug] Financial Times - could Linux dethrone the software king?

[Chris Ball]

>> On 22 Jan 2003 12:11:55, John Hearns <john.hearns at cern.ch> said:

   > Wasn't it Richard M Stallman who was appalled when passwords were
   > introduced on the system he was working on at MIT?  He believed all
   > software should be free. Leading to the start of the free software
   > movement.

It was, though I imagine that pointing an ssh client at rms at gnu.org will
do less than give me a direct login to his shell these days.

Also of note is that the his experiences at MIT are the reason that GNU
su(1) does not allow a `wheel' group.  From the info page:

   Why GNU `su' does not support the `wheel' group
   ===============================================

      (This section is by Richard Stallman.)

   Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the
   rest.  For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to
   seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system
   and keeping it secret from everyone else.  (I was able to thwart this
   coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I
   wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

   However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone.  Under the usual
   `su' mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes
   with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest.  The "wheel
   group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power
   of the rulers.

   I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers.  If you are
   used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you
   might find this idea strange at first.

Attempting to conduct these sorts of politics at the expense of system
security these days is, I'm sure, one of the many incompatibilities
holding up corporations from adopting Linux.

- Chris.
-- 
$a="printf.net";  Chris Ball | chris at void.$a | www.$a | finger: chris@$a


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