On 11/11/10 14:38, Vic wrote:
I'm not the only one. Unix and Linux Sys admin book (fourth edition) p8,
saying that using the term GNU/Linux has its own political baggage
It certainly has some political baggage. Most of us just ignore politics,
as they rarely get code out the door.
only officially endorsed by the Debian distro.
If the book says that, then the book is wrong. I've seen many people
outside of the Debian distro who understand the G/L term to be correct.
You just don't usually see many people outside GNU getting worked up about
it.
Linux is the kernel, OS and distro to most people.
...To most people who do not understand where all these things come from.
Here is one for verbose Vic :-
http://www.topology.org/linux/lingl.html
"linux is an operating system
linux/gnu is a development system
Ubuntu linux is a linux distribution
OpenSuSE linux is a linux distribution
Fedora linux is a linux distribution"
"quote from "The design of the unix operating system", Maurice J. Bach,
Prentice/Hall, 1986, page 4:
"The operating system interacts directly with the hardware, providing
common services to programs and insulating them from hardware
idiosyncrasies. Viewing the system as a set of layers, the operating
system is commonly called the system kernel, or just the kernel,
emphasizing its isolation from user programs. Because programs are
independent of the underlying hardware, it is easy to move them between
UNIX systems running on different hardware if the programs do not make
assumptions about the underlying hardware."
So he goes on, and basically confirms the Stallman definition of an OS
is different to what actually is an OS, hence how Stallman comes up with
GNU/Linux. I started working in 1984 with Unix, 8086 and 6800 CPUs,
machine code and also bit slice processors customised for telecoms use.
I understand how innovative and difficult developing a kernel/OS really
is and how some sections choose to undermine the community that created
it. Credit due for all sections responsible for a Linux distro, but
without Linux, you would not have the open source competition to Unix
and M$ which is now really offering a true alternative (Red Hat, Ubuntu,
Android, etc).
"The tail is trying to wag the dog!"
John.
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