It's more than GCC

It's more than GCC

There's Glibc, which cannot be replaced (except for toy projects and purpose built tiny distros).

There's Bash, coreutils, diffutils, findutils, grep, gzip, readline, tar, screen, etc. Most of these could in theory be replaced by BSD software, but the easiest way to do that is to wipe your GNU/Linux installation and install FreeBSD :-)

The "it's replaceable" argument actually implies removing the "Linux" from "GNU/Linux" since GNU cannot be replaced (glibc at the very least) but the Linux kernel can and has been replaced with the kernels of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris.

Writing development tools was an essential part of making an operating system. In fact, some of GNU's best work was in enabling others to help by producing the development tools and the licences. As well as GCC and GDB, the GNU project wrote Make, Gawk, GNU sed, Bison, binutils, gettext, among others.

We're not talking about a one trick pony here.

glibc is replaceable by uClibc. uClibc lacks some important things glibc 
has got (most notably the binary compatibility commitment), but is still 
perfectly *usable* (well, it supports most of POSIX by now, at least the 
parts people actually use).

That, as Mr. Clinton will agree, depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

I mean, sure, it *is* possible in a post to an LWN story.

But where're the uClibc based distros?  And I don't mean toy projects, unused experiments.

/coriordan smokes a cigar

Well, I know my systems wouldn't boot without it (it's damn useful as a 
libc in an initramfs: klibc is too small to handle a lot of stuff you 
might reasonably put in there, but uClibc happens just fine).