Re: that old GNU/Linux argument

Antonio Olivares wrote:
So far I haven't seen a pro-GNU/Linux person

describe what GNU/Linux is and

what it isn't. It would be interesting to see

whether they include the

kitchen sink in GNU/Linux.

Correction: Alexandre Oliva has said that "an
operating system is a kernel
plus a bunch of userland libraries and programs that users
and other
applications generally rely on" and that GNU is an
example of an operating
system. I can't believe I forgot that.

It's a bit vague, but clearly a whole lot less than all
of Fedora or Debian.
It could be taken to mean just a kernel and the GNU command
line tools, or it
could include X and Gnome too.

Björn Persson

--

Using google with the search phrase "why is it called GNU/Linux?", we get
many hits, most notably

http://www.gnu.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

None of those give a clear answer either. The FSF frequently says that "the
operating system" or "the whole system" should be called GNU/Linux, but I'm
not sure if they really intend "the whole system" to mean "all the software
on the computer" or even Fedora Everything or all 21 CDs of Debian. It may
well be that when they say "the whole system" they mean "the whole operating
system", and that they define the operating system as all or most GNU
programs including Gnome, plus Linux, X and maybe Sendmail.

If that's the case, then this argument is really a case of people talking past
each other, because then we have a group who say that everything that makes
up a distribution is Linux against another group who say that a rather small
part of a distribution is GNU/Linux.

Björn Persson

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