[ale] Time to stir the pot

Michael Trausch mike at trausch.us
Wed Jan 4 17:25:35 EST 2012


On 01/04/2012 12:47 PM, leam hall wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Rich Faulkner <rfaulkner at 34thprs.org>
>> > wrote:
>>> >> And yes, I too think it should be called a GNU/Linux system....
> 
> I cannot disagree more. I don't change the name of my car model
> depending on which gas station I stop in, nor do we buy houses based
> on the tools used to build them. RMS' insistance on GNU/Portapotty
> crap just makes him look little. Why not be proud of the cool work GNU
> has provided instead of trying to ride Linus' coat tails?

I'm not sure that I follow here.

Linux is a kernel.  Not an operating system, an operating system KERNEL.
 It is but one component of a fully functional operating system.

The most common distributions use GNU to provide the rest of the
operating system.  Therefore it is perfectly reasonable to call it a
GNU/Linux distribution.

It's no different than, say, GNU/kFreeBSD, for example, which uses the
FreeBSD OS kernel but GNU for the rest of the operating system.

This also makes it rather easy to be able to distinguish the norm (that
is, GNU/Linux) from things which are truly different.  Some use Linux in
their name, and others (such as Android) do not.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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