that old GNU/Linux argument

Alexandre Oliva aoliva at redhat.com
Mon Jul 21 00:15:24 UTC 2008


On Jul 20, 2008, Anders Karlsson <anders at trudheim.co.uk> wrote:

>  And holding HURD up as an example don't really hold water,
> considering it's past and present state.

Honestly, this argument is a bit misguided.  It is true that HURD's
choice of kernel model slowed things down, but the main factor for its
slow development since 1992 was that a Free kernel that worked with
the GNU operating system was available.  Creating one as part of the
GNU operating system didn't make as much sense any more, just like
creating an MTA didn't make much sense because of sendmail, and
creating a text processing system didn't make much sense because of
TeX.

> I'll let you happily argue the toss until the cows come home, but GNU
> is in itself not an operating system.

So how do you refer to a full operating system minus a kernel?  Say,
GNU-Hurd, or "[GNU/]Linux"-Linux?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}




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