First FOSS OS? [LWN.net]

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 12:24 UTC (Thu) by broonie (subscriber, #7078)
In reply to: First FOSS OS? by bronson
Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world

Debian uses the term GNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd, and GNU/kFreeBSD).

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First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:36 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> Debian uses the term GNU/Linux (and GNU/Hurd, and GNU/kFreeBSD).

And there's a reason they do so and that nobody else of any size does.

From Chapter 10 of Richard Stallman's biography, "Free as in Freedom",
available online at http://www.faifzilla.org/ch10.html

> Shortly after the Manifesto's release, the Free Software Foundation
> made its first major request. Stallman wanted Murdock to call its
> distribution "GNU/Linux." At first, Murdock says, Stallman had wanted
> to use the term " Lignux"-"as in Linux with GNU at the heart of
> it"-but a sample testing of the term on Usenet and in various impromptu
> hacker focus groups had merited enough catcalls to convince Stallman to
> go with the less awkward GNU/Linux.
...
> In 1996, Murdock, following his graduation from Purdue, decided to hand
> over the reins of the growing Debian project. He had already been
> ceding management duties to Bruce Perens
...
> According to Perens, Stallman was taken aback by the decision but had
> the wisdom to roll with it. "He gave it some time to cool off and sent
> a message that we really needed a relationship. He requested that we
> call it GNU/Linux and left it at that. I decided that was fine. I made
> the decision unilaterally. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief."

So Bruce Perens took credit for that decision.

Rob

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:18 UTC (Thu) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link]

Given the state of the Debian lists and the political views of many people associated with it's as much "It's easier to call it GNU/Linux than to deal with people banging on about how we should do that" as anything else.