Re: Your LWN articles

In your letter, you summarized our reasons for the name GNU/Linux
thus:
 
    You feel you are entitled to call the resulting system "GNU" because
    the GNU project had a vision of an entirely free system and
    concentrated on providing those pieces of infrastructure that could
    not freely be adopted from other free sources.
 
In that description you have carefully selected a part of what we say.
It fits what we did, but it it omits something important: we launched
the system's development, and did largest part of the work. The only
usable pieces of free software available when we started were TeX and
Bison, and Bison needed substantial extensions to serve the purpose.
During the 80s, as we were working on GNU, additional usable pieces of
free software occasionally became available, but we had to write a
large part of the system ourselves.
 
    But exactly the same was done by Torvalds, other Linux developers and
    distribution maintainers:
 
You've designed your description very precisely so that it can fit a
series of cases that are rather different. For instance, it fits what
we did, doing the bulk of the work of developing the GNU operating
system; it fits what Linus Torvalds did, writing a program that filled
the main gap in an almost complete operating system; it fits what what
GNU/Linux distribution maintainers such as Red Hat did, polishing and
extending a basically working system (alas, often extending it with
non-free software).
 
Despite your success in crafting a description that fits this range of
cases, they are not similar cases. Many others have also contributed
to the system, but we're the system's principal developer.
 
On another issue, you assert that our request for people to call the
system GNU/Linux "appears distasteful" and does more harm than good
for the GNU Project. In my experience, people usually react favorably
and it does more good than harm. It is mainly people who deny the
validity of this request that find it distasteful. Typically they
deny its validity because they underestimate our role in the
community's history, and for that very reason, they are less likely to
cooperate with us anyway. We ought not to be worried about what they
will think. This campaign appears to making slow but steady headway
in correcting people's picture of the system's origin.