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GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other!GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other!Posted Jun 1, 2011 19:11 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702)Parent article: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
http://fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/2007-05-21-gnu+linux has analysis that gets to very different results from those the cited report.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070928223909/http://www.slac... is another analysis that gets to a result that is even more disfavorable to Linux WRT GNU/Linux.
Now, considering that Linux didn't even double in size over the past 4 years, which would still put it ways behind the size of GNU back then, and that GNU also grew in this time-frame, I wonder how the report could possibly have arrived at a similar proportion of Linux and GNU.
But then, code size is not the whole story. Linus himself wrote, in the Linux 0.01 release announcement, that a kernel by itself gets you nowhere, and most of the tools used with linux are GNU software. So even he thought of linux as the kernel alone, and that GNU was essential to get a complete functional system.
This relationship could have changed like his opinion did, but it didn't: the combination of these two powerful developments fed each other and grew together and mostly inseparably, so neither party can reasonably claim credit alone.
That's why calling it GNU+Linux is just reasonable and fair. Calling it all Linux just feeds the misinformation for people who misperceive Linux as more than what it is. Of course those who seek this undeserved credit and want to spread misinformation will fight for it, finding other excuses to explain why it is fair to promote a small component of the whole over another equal-sized if not much bigger, older and just as historically-relevant component.
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GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other! Posted Jun 1, 2011 20:01 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
note that the earlier comparison you point at is comparing the size of compressed source archives, while this one is comparing lines of source code. remember things like logos will not compress well (and will not count as many lines of code either)
they kernel hasn't quite doubled in that timeframe
2.6.21 is 10332702 lines
but it's gown a lot. have the GNU tools been growing that fast?
in any case, unless someone points out a flaw in the tools (as opposed to just other studies that did other types of checks) I don't have reason to believe that the numbers presented in this article are wrong. the code to run this is available, so if you think there's a mistake in it, point it out.
given how large gcc and gdb are, I would be interested in seeing the results when run against the standard install rather than the entire repository
GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other! Posted Jun 2, 2011 1:17 UTC (Thu) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
There is one pretty obvious flaw with the way the study that found a similarity was conducted: it disregards GNU packages that are in Debian and that haven't been repackaged by Ubuntu.
As for logos, the GNU tools I counted don't contain any AFAIK. Unlike Linux.
Now, if you want to compare a standard install, it would be just fair to apply the same standard to both sides, namely, discarding unusual drivers and architectures from Linux too. Or, if you want to claim they're important, then so are the less-than-common languages, architectures and operating systems supported by GCC, GDB and glibc, the architectures and object file formats supported by binutils, and all the options (or lack thereof) of Gnome.
Anyway, even if Linux *had* doubled in size in that time-frame and GNU hadn't grown at all, my very limited study with just a few GNU components showed they were 3 times larger that Linux, so these GNU tools alone would still be at least 50% larger than Linux.
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