On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 09:58, Ross Werner wrote: > On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: > > On Mon, 2004-02-09 at 08:39, Ross Werner wrote: > > > I would submit to you that Debian and RedHat are "distributions", not > > > Operating Systems. > > > > X is not part of the OS. I can have a working usable OS without it. > > It seems you've missed my entire point. You can have a working, usable > _computer_ without X. You can't have a working, usable _computer_ without > bash, or libc, or init. You can't have a working, usable _computer_ > without RAM, a CPU, and a motherboard.
Yup, must be. A _computer_ without an OS is just so much silicon. I still don't see your point. Yes, I know you can write software that runs directly on the hardware without any OS at all, that's not what we're talking about here. > To recap: thought experiment time. > > Let's say I have a "minimal install", the minimum amount required to get > my computer to run, consisting of the Linux kernel plus some GNU > utilities. I call this "the Linux OS plus some GNU utilities". You call > it, when being exactly correct, "the GNU/Linux OS". > > Let's say now I change the system to get rid of all GNU utilities, and > use, say, some BSD utilities hacked together to perform the same function. > > Under your definition, now we have a _different_ operating system: "the > BSD/Linux OS". In my opinion, it's still the same operating system--only > the outer-level utilities have changed. > > Would you honestly term the latter a different operating system? Absolutely I would. No doubt. This is precisely how I see it. I imagine this is how RMS sees it as well. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
