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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?Posted Jun 1, 2011 6:11 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)In reply to: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux? by rsidd Parent article: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
It really makes no difference what you "consider" to be part of the GNU project. The fact is that Glibc is the software you chose to add to. All the code you wrote for it is now held under FSF's exclusive copyright, with your explicit signed approval. Glibc was then and is still unambiguously under FSF management, $&%$& or no. (Eglibc, used in Debian and offshoots, is another story; your code is in there too, and still owned by FSF, but managed by somebody else. You might feel better about working on eglibc.)
The fact is that the Linux kernel would have been useless had there not been a GNU project, already in place, to drop it wholesale into. If Linux had not come along, a newly unencumbered BSD kernel would have been adapted a year or two later, and would since have forked, and would now be managed by mostly the same people as do Linux today -- maybe Linus included. It would, then, have been a GNU/BSD system. The same names would be complaining about that, instead, with arguments of exactly equal merit.
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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux? Posted Jun 1, 2011 7:48 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
First, I am not Ulrich Drepper. I thought I made it clear that I was merely quoting him.
Second, the idea that the GNU system in 1991 was a complete Unix-like system lacking only a kernel, into which Linux could conveniently be dropped, is a myth propagated by Stallman. There is no such thing as a complete system without a kernel. GNU did contribute the C library, compiler/toolchain, and a bunch of system utilities. These things existed in, eg, /opt/gnu on Sun systems, and were very far from being a complete system. BSD contributed a bunch of other utilities. As did MIT (X), Knuth (TeX), Ousterhout (Tcl/Tk), Wall (Perl), and many, many others. Putting all of these disparate things together into a working system was a significant undertaking, that was not done until AFTER Linus published his kernel -- because A WORKING SYSTEM REQUIRES A KERNEL! Which, incidentally, the GNU project still does not have, twenty years down the line -- hence the grimace whenever they encounter Linux.
How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux? Posted Jun 1, 2011 9:31 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>Second, the idea that the GNU system in 1991 was a complete Unix-like system lacking only a kernel, into which Linux could conveniently be dropped, is a myth propagated by Stallman. There is no such thing as a complete system without a kernel. GNU did contribute the C library, compiler/toolchain, and a bunch of system utilities.
"What did the Romans ever do for us?" (c) Monty Python
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