Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.
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Member since:2006-02-15
At the end you can't use your computer with Linux and you can't use your computer with GNU (to some extend you can) but if you combine Linux and GNU you get an operating system which allows you to use your computer so GNU/Linux is a adequate name.
Linux can also be combined with non-GNU software and still make a useable computer. As such, Linux != GNU/Linux. Sure enough, I don't know of any Linux distro which would provide a useable userland without GNU software, but still it is possible and as such Linux just isn't synonymous with GNU/Linux.
If you wan't a shorter name you should pick the part which is larger and more important and this is GNU. Why is GNU more important? Give someone a GNU System and replace the Kernel Linux with another Kernel and most user won't discover any difference. On the other Hand take Linux out of GNU and put it e.g. into MacOS (to replace the BSD kernel) people will discover a huge difference.
You are contradicting yourself. First you say changing kernel won't change anything for the end-user and then you say it will make a huge impact? Nah, I'd just say both GNU and Linux are more-or-less equally important. Neither of them would be what they are now without eachother. All the Linux-related development just wouldn't have been possible without GCC et al, but they wouldn't be so good as they are now without all the movement and interested developers that Linux has attracted.
So, in the end, I'll just stick to calling GNU GNU and Linux-distributions as Linux.
Member since:2005-07-15
>As such, Linux != GNU/Linux.
right! Linux is a kernel and GNU/Linux is an complete operating system, the combination of GNU and Linux.
>You are contradicting yourself. First you say changing kernel won't change anything for the end-user and then you say it will make a huge impact?
No!
In the first scenario i change the Kernel: GNU system once with a Linux kernel and once with a different kernel. -> almost no differences even that the kernel has changed.
In the second scenario i keep the kernel and change the rest of the system: Linux kernel in a GNU system vs Linux kernel in MacOS. -> hugh differences even if the kernel is the same
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Member since:
2005-07-15
>F.ex. GNOME doesn't belong to GNU as far as I know
GNOME is a GNU Project (see: http://www.gnome.org/about/)
By the way Gtk+ is a GNU project too.
See http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/ for all programs which are part of the GNU project.
>As such, should it be called GNOME/Linux, or KDE/Linux, or something similar?
GNOME/Linux is not necessary because GNOME is already mentioned with GNU so you can stay by GNU/Linux. If you want to give KDE credits you could call it KDE/GNU or KDE/GNU/Linux or whatever you want.
(see: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many)
At the end you can't use your computer with Linux and you can't use your computer with GNU (to some extend you can) but if you combine Linux and GNU you get an operating system which allows you to use your computer so GNU/Linux is a adequate name. It's a little bit like TCP/IP. You need both for a common network stack so it is neither TCP nor IP but TCP/IP.
If you wan't a shorter name you should pick the part which is larger and more important and this is GNU. Why is GNU more important? Give someone a GNU System and replace the Kernel Linux with another Kernel and most user won't discover any difference. On the other Hand take Linux out of GNU and put it e.g. into MacOS (to replace the BSD kernel) people will discover a huge difference. So while the kernel is an important part it doesn't make the difference. The difference come from the part of the OS which is necessary to run a computer and interacts with the user and not the part which interacts with the hardware.
Edited 2008-02-27 11:48 UTC