On Wed, May 29, 2002, Moshe Zadka wrote about "Re: Elections": >.. > > lucky enough to get some email from Moshe Zadka regarding the fucking GNU / > > GNU/Linux thing - I don't stand this shit and I won't tolerate it. Everyone >.. > > And when are you doing that? Do you really let people admire the neat > way the kernel boots up?
It appears that both of you guys are real fanatics about this issue - neither of you is going to change the other one's opinion... I think the "truth" lies (as it many times does) somewhere in the middle. Stallman is correct in his observation that the name "Linux" gives credit to a single person (Linus) while his share in what you might call a "Linux System" is relatively small (but not marginal). Stallman is right that even without the emergence of Linux (the kernel), we might have been doing almost exactly the same thing we're doing now on Linux with a different kernel, for example BSD or (when the cows come home) Hurd. Recently, I've even seen people label "Linux" any Unix-like system, including some commercial Unix. How the tides have turned... But I think Stallman is wrong in demanding that the system be called GNU/Linux. The GNU project is one of the most important ones to donate packages to any "Linux" distribution, but the fact of the matter is that aside from the compilation tools (gcc, binutils, glibc, etc.) GNU's stuff is becoming more and more optional as we speak, and other projects (Xfree86, KDE, Mozilla, etc.) are becoming more and more important. A person might use a "Linux" machine rarely using GNU utilities: he might be mostly using KDE graphical tools to browse directories, files, and so on, and when he does need a shell he might be logged in through openssh (non-GNU), using Zsh (non-GNU), editing with Vim (non-GNU), programming in Perl (non-GNU), compressing with bzip2 (non-GNU), etc. You get the picture. I'm not claiming the GNU project is not important - it is *very* important, and even more so in historic perspective. But just as it is not fair to call a system "Linux", it also isn't fair to call it "GNU/Linux", as if only these two people (Linus Torvalds and Richard M. Stallman) are responsible for a majority of the system. What about the XFree86 people? The KDE people? The Mozilla people? The hundreds of other people writing utilities included in common "Linux" distributions? In fact, if historical significance is important, why not "commemorate" in the system's name the fact that it was the AT&T and UCBerkeley people who invented Unix, and most of what GNU and Linux currently are, is actually a "clone" of those ideas? I believe that an entire system should get a completely new name, without the "baggage" of the names of some of its contributers. An example name is "Redhat". A meaningless name that has come to specify a certain combination of a Linux kernel, GNU tools, and hundreds of other non-GNU tools. "Debian" is another name - it is associated with a different combination of such tools. Both of these are neither the "true" Linux, the true GNU/Linux, or nothing. They are Linux-based, GNU-based, X11-based, etc., systems - this is what object-oriented programmers would call "multiple inheritance". By the way, here is a cynical reply I wrote (in personal correspondence) about why I consider the name GNU/Linux just as problematic as the name Linux: "Why is GNU/Linux problematic? Because a much as GNU did, many other groups did other important things too. Bell Labs invented Unix which is the idea behind all of GNU. So we should Call it BellLabs/UNIX/GNU/Linux? MIT's X group and XFree86 did the very big part of the system, X Windows, that most modern users rely on. So now it should be BellLabs/UNIX/MIT/XFree86/GNU/Linux? KDE is another very big project which many people think "Linux" would be worthless without. Mozilla is a major broswer. IBM did the Hebrew port. So now it should be BellLabs/UNIX/MIT/XFree86/KDE/Mozilla/IBM/GNU/Linux? It is beginning to sound like "Chad Gadya". The only legitimate reason to call it GNU/Linux is because most projects in Linux distributions use the "GNU" GPL. But I don't think that an organization should get credit for something just for making the license, just like I don't think in any organization the lawyers get credit for progress the actual managers and workers do." -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, May 29 2002, 19 Sivan 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy http://nadav.harel.org.il |every minute of it. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
