Hi.

How well do Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth get along?

I do know that Richard Stallman advocates these distros http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html and he himself uses gNewSense.

I've also read that Linus Torvalds used Fedora which is on Richard Stallman's page of 'Explaining Why We Don't Endorse Other Systems'@ http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Would Ubuntu be Mark Shuttleworth's main OS?

It is unfortunate to see divisions within the GNU/Linux community as we've got more in common than not.

I'd like to hear other users views.

Would you expect all OSS folks to use the same distro when there are so many ?

No, thats what are all those lots of distros for

Of course not. I was simply asking how well do Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Mark Shuttleworth get along?

Not when it comes to principles, necessarily.

Probably, not very well. Stallman is a man of stringent principles and Torvalds is a pragmatist, so they'll disagree on lots of things (Linus to Richard 'ok, and how late is the Hurd, now?' Richard to Linus '...and that proprietary VCS, how did that work out?..
Linus to Richard 'but at least I got the solution (git) out and working pretty rapidly...', and on, and on).

And, Shuttleworth is primarily a businessman, and maybe the one thing that you could get Linus and RMS to agree on is a slight distrust of business.

Truth is these are different personalities and we need them all.

I have great admiration for RMS but do other people here think that his stance on free software is extreme or is he absolutely correct?
Unfortunately at the moment it seems necessary to use non-free software to get video & wireless drivers to work (or am I wrong on that?) on certain computers.

I'd love to see a video of all three sitting down to a discussion.

Some people may think that his stance is extreme, but it isn't extreme because some software is proprietary and you need it (currently) to achieve certain aims. I personally don't have a problem with using non-free software, but if I can achieve the same with a free software I would choose the free one.

I'd buy the beer if they wanted to get together and talk about what ever they want.

Stallman is, IMO, extreme...but also totally correct.

You dont need non-free drivers to get wireless to work, if you get teh right wireless chipset. As for video, some of the very newest ATI/AMD and nVidia cards might not be supported by the open source drivers. Not that buying the newest 'bleeding edge' hardware is a great idea with any linux distro.