A bit of history from an old-timer...  This was back in the early 1990's -
pre world wide web, when we old timers used a primitive technology called
"usenet" to communicate.

Linus to Richard Stallman:  I've written a new operating system.  I'd like
to call it Gnu/Linux.

Richard Stallman to Linus:  No!  The operating system for GNU is "the herd."

Linus to Richard Stallman:  OK, I'll just call it Linux.

[years later, Linux is popular, the herd won't even boot on PC's yet.]

Richard Stallman to the World:  Linux should really be called GNU/Linux.

Linux to the World:  Too late, you had your chance.


-- 
Bob Matthews
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Truman State University
100 E. Normal
Kirksville, MO   63501

http://www2.truman.edu/~matthews



> From: iosif <[email protected]>
> Reply-To: <[email protected]>
> Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 10:40:35 -0500
> To: <[email protected]>
> Subject: [fsck] Re: [Offtopic] GNU/Linux is kind of itchy
> 
> "Credit for Linux generally goes to its human namesake, one Linus
> Torvalds, a Finn who got the whole thing rolling in 1991 when he used
> some of the GNU tools to write the beginnings of a Unix kernel that
> could run on PC-compatible hardware. And indeed Torvalds deserves all
> the credit he has ever gotten, and a whole lot more. But he could not
> have made it happen by himself, any more than Richard Stallman could
> have. To write code at all, Torvalds had to have cheap but powerful
> development tools, and these he got from Stallman's GNU project."
> 
> -- In the Beginning Was the Command Line
> 
> On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 09:13, [email protected] <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 10:54 PM, Huan Truong <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:30 -0500, "iosif" <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>> should be GNU/Linux :)
>>> 
>>> I remember I've read something about this on Linux Hater's Blog (btw,
>>> LHB is a good one) but can't recall.
>>> 
>>> So take the following with some sort of humor. Not as enjoyable as LHB
>>> but the following's the best I can find.
>>> 
>>> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16843&cid=1941648
>>> 
>>> - Is GCC critical to Linux? All of the following are able to compile the
>>> kernel.
>>> 
>>> LLVM http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2010-October/011711.html
>>> TCC http://bellard.org/tcc/
>>> ICC http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-compilers/
>>> 
>>> Btw, I'm trying to get 2.6.36 compiled with icc (someone claimed that it
>>> was possible without any patch
>>> http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1832598&cid=33974198 ) but I
>>> personally wasn't able to. They said icc makes it run 20% faster. Not a
>>> bad deal.
>> 
>> Well any distro your using will be using gcc and glibc though.
>> 
>> The real reason why asking for GNU/Linux is unreasonable is because
>> the reasoning is that GNU is such an essential part of the operating
>> system that it needs credit. But it ignores the modern definition of a
>> operating system certainly includes the services provided by X (which
>> still manages device drivers for video cards, if thats not "OS" then I
>> don't know what is) and arguably also the API and services provided by
>> KDE or Gnome. So if you are going to say GNU/Linux, you should also
>> call the OS used by Ubuntu "GNU/Linux/X/Gnome".
>> 
>> Or you could just call it Linux. :)
>> 
>> Ian
>> 
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