GNU/Busybox ?!?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:33 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That insistence is not legally backed (and actually it's just RMS saying `I won't talk to you unless you call it GNU/foo', and RMS is quite within his rights to decide who he personally talks to, even if everyone else thinks this particular criterion is silly.)

RMS's insistence is restricted as far as I know to systems which run a lot of GNU software by default. Of course much GNU software is moribund and nobody runs it (e.g. the old `git'), some software has been arbitrarily defined as `GNU software' because it already existed and RMS simply grandfathered it into what was then a sort of distro (e.g. X), and most of what systems run nowadays isn't GNU software. So these days the insistence strikes me as wrongheaded.

The GNU Project is sort of halfway between a distributor, a development umbrella, and a naming factory, and most of these messes start because RMS is using one definition while everyone else is using the other (e.g. `GNU software' meaning `the theoretically-extant distribution we call GNU ships it', versus `GNU software' meaning `copyrighted by the FSF and maintained under the FSF's aegis'). I really wish RMS would pick one of these and stick with it (probably the development umbrella, because in practice this is what it has been since the 1990s).