Re: GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman

Ben Hutchings (womble@zzumbouk.demon.co.uk)
Sun, 28 Mar 1999 04:49:12 +0100


On Fri, Mar 26, 1999 at 11:21:52AM +0900, Tom Holroyd wrote:
> >> Richard Stallman stood up and insisted that
> >> Linux be called GNU Linux?
>
> You know, he was talking about the distributions and not the kernel
> itself. People tend to refer to RedHat's or other's distributions as
> "Linux"* when in fact "Linux"* refers only to the kernel.
<snip>

Which is inaccurate, but a natural step in language usage. I think it
is reasonable to call software distributions that use the Linux kernel
`Linux distributions' since the creation of this kernel was the
trigger for the creation of those distributions. It may seem unfair
that GNU doesn't get credited for providing many of the tools that
made those distributions possible, but that's just tough. GNU isn't
the only project that goes uncredited when people refer to a complete
system using the Linux kernel as `Linux', but it's the only one that
has whiners that complain about this.

We're only talking about software here, not a group of real people
being given some sort of an insulting name.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, software engineer | web site to be reconstructed at some time
womble@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk | Team *AMIGA* | Jay Miner Society - www.jms.org
Unix is many things to many people,
but it's never been everything to anybody.

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