And the most important software in a Linux system for ordinary people is the kernel and the device drivers. This is what makes Linux useable in contrast to, say, Minix. It was the Linux kernel that made it possible for free software to compete with Windows.
It isn't. Compare it with gnu/netbsd, the kernel doesn't make that much difference. I'd say KDE and Gnome are what have made the system usable, and one of those is a GNU project.
Another absurd point that RMS usualy brings on is that calling the system Linux is to give credit to just one person. Check the file CREDITS on the root directory of any linux kernel.
Yeah, but the name "Linux" by itself refers only to Linus, wheras the name GNU refers to the GNU organisation with its thousands of members.
When some asks what car we drive we often say "Ford" or "Toyota" we don't say we drive a "Huygens/Rivaz/Lenoir/Benz" derived product. This is eventhough the IP from todays automobile is probably over 50% from these original source. It is convience if nothing else.
It may originally have been came up with by these people, but it's all been built, or at least put together, by Ford. Wheras gnome, gcc, etc. are still all made by the GNU. I suppose you could argue that you don't list the engine maker, just the final assembler, but by that logic you should call your system "redhat" or "suse" or whatever. Linux isn't any more "final" a component of the typical "linux system" than any of the gnu software"
Also if I install the cygwin on my window machine do I refer to it as GNU/Win?
It might be a good idea, since this would tell people more about what software you could run. Certainly if you replace software to the point that more of your system was written by the GNU than MS then it should be a GNU/win system.
Hurd isn't finished because it doesn't need to be, linux is there. They can take the time, experiment, make sure it's the best it can be. If linux wasn't around you can bet hurd would be finished and working, perhaps not with as much hardware support or performance as linux has now, but pretty close.
Did you know, that the Mozilla source is 30 times larger than the Apache web-servers, 20 times as large as the Java 1.0 JDK/JRE sources, 5 times bigger than the standard Perl distribution, twice as big as the Linux kernel source and nearly as large as the GNOME 2.0 source, even, when 150 standard applications are included with it ?
I know the Mozilla on my system was built from a 30mb.tar.bz2, wheras gnome is around 150mb in the same format.
What is GNU for you ? GPL'd code or binutils, gcc and the dev stuff, needed for Linux development ?
Code from GNU projects, which tend to have gnu in the name. Yes the toolchain and libraries are a very important part of it, but so are things like gnome, gnunet, etc. If one is considering the whole GNU system then it's all the free programs including things like X, but when considering authorship of the system we should only look at those written by gnu.
If there would not have been Linus Torvalds' plaything, the kernel, then Mr. Stallman would be no more than a long haired, full bearded freak, that hasn't seen more of corporate space than the parking lot in front of such a company, walking around with a shield on his shoulders:
I'd be very surprised if that was the case. Had linux not been around, Hurd would have concentrated on getting a releasable version, and would undoubtably have done so. It would have set the system back a couple of years, yes, but losing linux wouldn't destroy GNU.
And while the sole fact, that without GNU Linux might not exist, is true, it is even more true, that not third a people would need to consider the GPL and OpenSource today, if there would not be Linux.
I really don't think that's the case. Linux happened to be written at the right time to become the final piece of gnu. It's only this accident of timing that makes it appear so important.
I don't know. First, that 22% number sounds a little weird. A typical Linux kernel from your average distribution has at least a million lines of code compiled in. Do the GNU programs on your machine constitute over 22 million lines of code?
I don't know, but I'm willing to believe it, looking at the size of gnome and all the associated libraries, and then the huge number of other small projects that are all gnu.
Based on compile time (a horrible measure, I know) KDE + OpenOffice + X.org would constitute about 60% of the code in my Gentoo distribution. Text mode terminal only interface is anything but "typical" these days.
Remember gcc is a lot slower for C++ than C. And how long did it take you to emerge system at the start? Almost all the base programs are gnu, but quite a lot of them are at the stage where they no longer need much maintenance (no new features have been added for years and most of the bugs have been eliminated by now) so you don't notice them as much when emerging as programs that get frequent updates.
I call it "Linux" because it's more than just the kernel, "Linux" represents a movement that started to really get rolling, and accelerate, once we had the Linux kernel.
It took 12 years of work by the GNU to get to a stage where adding a kernel could really get things going.
Other than Linux being released under the GNU GPL, they have no real connection
No, but the typical "linux distribution" has a very strong connection to the GNU.
Linux could run without GNU programs (for example, by running the original UNIX programs)
Such a system would not be GNU and shouldn't be called GNU, it would be "Unix/Linux" or similar. But without glibc it would be a different system - programs compiled for our "linux" wouldn't run on it, and vice versa.
just as GNU programs don't necessarily require (or even use) Linux (yes, many of them do, but a lot of them don't, too - for example, the filesharing program Gnucleus).
Absolutely. You can have non-linux gnu systems - Debian does whole distributions of GNU/NetBSD (GNU with the netbsd kernel) and GNU/Hurd, and non-gnu linux systems. But being GNU is more "fundamental" than being linux - it would be far easier to replace linux in a typical "linux distribution" than to replace all the gnu programs.
And yet it was the Linux kernel that put the rest of the GNU software on the map.
Linus wrote the last step, giving him credit for the whole thing is like saying the guy who put the mast on the top built the whole empire state building. Yes that may have been the bit that made it the tallest building in the world, but it couldn't have happened without the rest.
Given that the GNU folks are too incompitent (sic) to write a decent kernel to run the rest of their stuff,
They are not. They were putting the effort in to write a proper kernel. Have you looked at the linux 0.1 code? I'm not saying I could write it, but it's pretty horrible. Linus chucked his mostly-broken kernel out into the world and let people work on it. It worked, but not because Linus was a better coder than the GNU folks, just because he opened up more. Maybe this was a great insight - but it could equally have been dumb luck.
The reason there is no working hurd now is that given the success of linux the gnu folks made a conscious decision to take it in experimental directions, almost making it a research kernel. If there was no Linux there would be a working hurd pretty soon after - maybe not as soon, maybe slower moving, with less support for new hardware perhaps, but much better designed and architectured, and probably more stable as a result.
I guess the previous poster is right and we should call Linux, KLinux because without KDE Linux would be a totally different operating system from the user's view. It makes up most of any modern Linux distribution. Right?
Yes, if KDE makes up most of your OS then you should by all means call it a KDE system. KDE is a platform you can actually write software for, so go ahead.
If 22% of the system is licensed under a GNU license but most is not offically part of "gnu" then is it really a 100% pure GNU system?
No, 22% comes from actual GNU projects. Remember that the whole of Gnome is a gnu project to start with.
The gnu license requires all of the source code to be gnu before anything is called gnu. To me this means unless its purely gnu/linux than its Linux.
Don't conflate the GPL and the GNU, they are different things. The GNU project, as outlined in their manifesto and started years before linux, was meant to provide a free operating system. That is what most of the linux distros are.
BSD is doing fine without gnu with the exception of the gcc of course. There have been free c/c++ compilers in the past but most of them have died out due to gcc's popularity.
BSD was only "freed" after GNU was succeeding and with a lot of encouragement from the GNU. It was far from inevitable that BSD would become free without their intervention.
But Linux would not have existed without GNU right? Yes I think it would
Yes, it would, running using the minix tools, which frankly aren't up to much. There weren't any other free toolchains. Getting linux to the state it is today would probably take as long as it took the gnu to get their tools ready to where linux could complete the puzzle - about 12 years, roughly as long as Linux has been around so far.
BSD and yes Linux could have easily existed without gnu. Posix is still huge and just as functional and other FOSS c compilers would have gained popularity without gnu which Linux would have used.
Without the gnu there wouldn't *be* any other FOSS c compilers. Linux itself wouldn't be FOSS, in all likelihood - the license was only changed with 0.12 to help people combine it with gnu.
BSD has been opensourced for a long time before GNU.
That's a lie, plain and simple. A lot of BSD was free, but it wasn't seen as important, so there was enough non-free code to make a difference. It was not possible to have a non-trivial entirely free OS before GNU.
Absolutely, though do run ldd on your programs and consider all the libraries you're depending on. They may not have the glamour and visibility but they probably took more effort to write. Still, it makes a helluva lot more sense than calling it Linux.
What is that based on? I'm sure if you took *every* Linux distribution and considered *only the GNU code found common to them all*, you'll find that Linux code outweighs the non-kernel GNU code.
I believe it was an average based on considering the then "big 7" distros. Look at the distro you're using and see if it isn't true.
Hell, let's rename *every* GNU software product to simply "GNU". A little extreme? Okay, so that the authors can a share of the credit (though it's really this wonderful licensing scheme and the FSF that has permitted these authors to distribute Free code), we can call it GNU/Software where "Software" is the name the author had chosen.
GNU products already have gnu in the name, e.g. the GNu Object Model Environment, Gnu Image Manipulation Program, Gnu Privacy Guard, Gnu LIBC, Gnu LIB, GNUnet... When they're written by the gnu it makes perfect sense for gnu to name them - who else would you suggest does it? When they're not, then call them what you want. But the point is that the "largest minority" of the code for "linux" distributions was written by the gnu, and is in products with gnu in the name.
I haven't been a long time user, but all I can say is that I never had these random crashes with 2.4, and with 2.6 I get a lot, as bad as windows 98 in some cases. If you can, I'd say stick with 2.4 until 2.6 stabilises.
I can remember devfs being the next big thing, quite recently. People were saying it had huge advantages over the current system for/dev, was the future of linux, and it was a good idea to switch now.
In fact, it was almost identical to what people are now saying about udev. Makes me less eager to switch. Linux seems to have so many of these false starts that you hear nothing but praise of and then afterwards people say they were broken all along.
There is a simple reason why people don't use 2.6. It isn't stable. That's all there is to it. When the kernel devs finally get their act together and release a 2.6 that doesn't crash, that's when you'll see people switch.
I care about the results, and so far the 2.6 tree has produced a grand total of one kernel that actually works for me (2.6.11). And the obvious cause, rightly or wrongly, seems to be Linus messing around with the development process.
Or how would you like them to do it? "We will do things this way, and by god, we will do it like this untill the end of time! Even if better ways of doing this comes along, we will not change our ways!"
How about "We will change things only when the alternative has been shown to be unambiguously better on a smaller project, and only when changing major versions". I believe in experimentation but the kernel is such an important project that a bit more conservatism is called for.
What exactly is wrong with refining the development process?
Sometimes it seems like it's all refining and no development process actually happening. There are plenty of things that seem far more urgent, like releasing a kernel that's actually stable (it's at the stage that I'd go back to 2.4 if my distro didn't have so many things depending on 2.6).
His point is that 22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU, more than (pulling a number out my ass) any 3 other "authors" (or organisations) put together, wheras less than 1% is Linux. If you want to call it GNU/MIT/KDE/..., go on, but if you're going to call it by a single thing, that should be GNU, not Linux.
The key word there is "updated". Something that is updated every week, and where this week's article only makes sense this week (as opposed to a website where someone adds to it, but the added page "should" have been there all along), is not a typical web page. The web was seen as something where you wrote the pages and put them there, and the only reason to add to it was if there were new facts or things you hadn't put in the first time. Like a book, not a magazine. Blog sites are different from that.
Because he makes more that way. How many IPs could he get himself, and how long before they were caught? Wheras this way he's getting $25 for everyone who uses it, maybe more if it's per bot, and it adds up to more in the long run.
Any server worth its salt will be using SSL which is practically unbreakable (in that it would cost far more in terms of the computer power needed to break it than you could ever make). It's not a constant thing, 0xA3 could stand for entirely different cards on different hands. Methinks you need to learn more about encryption.
1).net still runs on at least 3 platforms thanks to Rotor, making it 2 better than Java
2) All the classes that were submitted for EMCA standardisation are released, they don't look to be missing anything important. I've seen plenty of perfectly good mono programs, which wouldn't be possible if mono was missing important classes.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't. Compare it with gnu/netbsd, the kernel doesn't make that much difference. I'd say KDE and Gnome are what have made the system usable, and one of those is a GNU project.
Another absurd point that RMS usualy brings on is that calling the system Linux is to give credit to just one person. Check the file CREDITS on the root directory of any linux kernel.
Yeah, but the name "Linux" by itself refers only to Linus, wheras the name GNU refers to the GNU organisation with its thousands of members.
So do I, but when I'm asked what operating system I'm running, it's GNU.
Anyway, you're right, but if the GNU wrote most of it it's up to them what they want it to be called.
It may originally have been came up with by these people, but it's all been built, or at least put together, by Ford. Wheras gnome, gcc, etc. are still all made by the GNU. I suppose you could argue that you don't list the engine maker, just the final assembler, but by that logic you should call your system "redhat" or "suse" or whatever. Linux isn't any more "final" a component of the typical "linux system" than any of the gnu software"
Also if I install the cygwin on my window machine do I refer to it as GNU/Win?
It might be a good idea, since this would tell people more about what software you could run. Certainly if you replace software to the point that more of your system was written by the GNU than MS then it should be a GNU/win system.
Hurd isn't finished because it doesn't need to be, linux is there. They can take the time, experiment, make sure it's the best it can be. If linux wasn't around you can bet hurd would be finished and working, perhaps not with as much hardware support or performance as linux has now, but pretty close.
I know the Mozilla on my system was built from a 30mb .tar.bz2, wheras gnome is around 150mb in the same format.
What is GNU for you ? GPL'd code or binutils, gcc and the dev stuff, needed for Linux development ?
Code from GNU projects, which tend to have gnu in the name. Yes the toolchain and libraries are a very important part of it, but so are things like gnome, gnunet, etc. If one is considering the whole GNU system then it's all the free programs including things like X, but when considering authorship of the system we should only look at those written by gnu.
If there would not have been Linus Torvalds' plaything, the kernel, then Mr. Stallman would be no more than a long haired, full bearded freak, that hasn't seen more of corporate space than the parking lot in front of such a company, walking around with a shield on his shoulders:
I'd be very surprised if that was the case. Had linux not been around, Hurd would have concentrated on getting a releasable version, and would undoubtably have done so. It would have set the system back a couple of years, yes, but losing linux wouldn't destroy GNU.
And while the sole fact, that without GNU Linux might not exist, is true, it is even more true, that not third a people would need to consider the GPL and OpenSource today, if there would not be Linux.
I really don't think that's the case. Linux happened to be written at the right time to become the final piece of gnu. It's only this accident of timing that makes it appear so important.
I don't know, but I'm willing to believe it, looking at the size of gnome and all the associated libraries, and then the huge number of other small projects that are all gnu.
Based on compile time (a horrible measure, I know) KDE + OpenOffice + X.org would constitute about 60% of the code in my Gentoo distribution. Text mode terminal only interface is anything but "typical" these days.
Remember gcc is a lot slower for C++ than C. And how long did it take you to emerge system at the start? Almost all the base programs are gnu, but quite a lot of them are at the stage where they no longer need much maintenance (no new features have been added for years and most of the bugs have been eliminated by now) so you don't notice them as much when emerging as programs that get frequent updates.
I call it "Linux" because it's more than just the kernel, "Linux" represents a movement that started to really get rolling, and accelerate, once we had the Linux kernel.
It took 12 years of work by the GNU to get to a stage where adding a kernel could really get things going.
Yes, I am
Other than Linux being released under the GNU GPL, they have no real connection
No, but the typical "linux distribution" has a very strong connection to the GNU.
Linux could run without GNU programs (for example, by running the original UNIX programs)
Such a system would not be GNU and shouldn't be called GNU, it would be "Unix/Linux" or similar. But without glibc it would be a different system - programs compiled for our "linux" wouldn't run on it, and vice versa.
just as GNU programs don't necessarily require (or even use) Linux (yes, many of them do, but a lot of them don't, too - for example, the filesharing program Gnucleus).
Absolutely. You can have non-linux gnu systems - Debian does whole distributions of GNU/NetBSD (GNU with the netbsd kernel) and GNU/Hurd, and non-gnu linux systems. But being GNU is more "fundamental" than being linux - it would be far easier to replace linux in a typical "linux distribution" than to replace all the gnu programs.
Linus wrote the last step, giving him credit for the whole thing is like saying the guy who put the mast on the top built the whole empire state building. Yes that may have been the bit that made it the tallest building in the world, but it couldn't have happened without the rest.
Given that the GNU folks are too incompitent (sic) to write a decent kernel to run the rest of their stuff,
They are not. They were putting the effort in to write a proper kernel. Have you looked at the linux 0.1 code? I'm not saying I could write it, but it's pretty horrible. Linus chucked his mostly-broken kernel out into the world and let people work on it. It worked, but not because Linus was a better coder than the GNU folks, just because he opened up more. Maybe this was a great insight - but it could equally have been dumb luck.
The reason there is no working hurd now is that given the success of linux the gnu folks made a conscious decision to take it in experimental directions, almost making it a research kernel. If there was no Linux there would be a working hurd pretty soon after - maybe not as soon, maybe slower moving, with less support for new hardware perhaps, but much better designed and architectured, and probably more stable as a result.
Yes, if KDE makes up most of your OS then you should by all means call it a KDE system. KDE is a platform you can actually write software for, so go ahead.
If 22% of the system is licensed under a GNU license but most is not offically part of "gnu" then is it really a 100% pure GNU system?
No, 22% comes from actual GNU projects. Remember that the whole of Gnome is a gnu project to start with.
The gnu license requires all of the source code to be gnu before anything is called gnu. To me this means unless its purely gnu/linux than its Linux.
Don't conflate the GPL and the GNU, they are different things. The GNU project, as outlined in their manifesto and started years before linux, was meant to provide a free operating system. That is what most of the linux distros are.
BSD is doing fine without gnu with the exception of the gcc of course. There have been free c/c++ compilers in the past but most of them have died out due to gcc's popularity.
BSD was only "freed" after GNU was succeeding and with a lot of encouragement from the GNU. It was far from inevitable that BSD would become free without their intervention.
But Linux would not have existed without GNU right? Yes I think it would
Yes, it would, running using the minix tools, which frankly aren't up to much. There weren't any other free toolchains. Getting linux to the state it is today would probably take as long as it took the gnu to get their tools ready to where linux could complete the puzzle - about 12 years, roughly as long as Linux has been around so far.
BSD and yes Linux could have easily existed without gnu. Posix is still huge and just as functional and other FOSS c compilers would have gained popularity without gnu which Linux would have used.
Without the gnu there wouldn't *be* any other FOSS c compilers. Linux itself wouldn't be FOSS, in all likelihood - the license was only changed with 0.12 to help people combine it with gnu.
BSD has been opensourced for a long time before GNU.
That's a lie, plain and simple. A lot of BSD was free, but it wasn't seen as important, so there was enough non-free code to make a difference. It was not possible to have a non-trivial entirely free OS before GNU.
Absolutely, though do run ldd on your programs and consider all the libraries you're depending on. They may not have the glamour and visibility but they probably took more effort to write. Still, it makes a helluva lot more sense than calling it Linux.
I believe it was an average based on considering the then "big 7" distros. Look at the distro you're using and see if it isn't true.
Hell, let's rename *every* GNU software product to simply "GNU". A little extreme? Okay, so that the authors can a share of the credit (though it's really this wonderful licensing scheme and the FSF that has permitted these authors to distribute Free code), we can call it GNU/Software where "Software" is the name the author had chosen.
GNU products already have gnu in the name, e.g. the GNu Object Model Environment, Gnu Image Manipulation Program, Gnu Privacy Guard, Gnu LIBC, Gnu LIB, GNUnet... When they're written by the gnu it makes perfect sense for gnu to name them - who else would you suggest does it? When they're not, then call them what you want. But the point is that the "largest minority" of the code for "linux" distributions was written by the gnu, and is in products with gnu in the name.
Slashdotter...daughters...does not compute
I haven't been a long time user, but all I can say is that I never had these random crashes with 2.4, and with 2.6 I get a lot, as bad as windows 98 in some cases. If you can, I'd say stick with 2.4 until 2.6 stabilises.
In fact, it was almost identical to what people are now saying about udev. Makes me less eager to switch. Linux seems to have so many of these false starts that you hear nothing but praise of and then afterwards people say they were broken all along.
There is a simple reason why people don't use 2.6. It isn't stable. That's all there is to it. When the kernel devs finally get their act together and release a 2.6 that doesn't crash, that's when you'll see people switch.
I care about the results, and so far the 2.6 tree has produced a grand total of one kernel that actually works for me (2.6.11). And the obvious cause, rightly or wrongly, seems to be Linus messing around with the development process.
Or how would you like them to do it? "We will do things this way, and by god, we will do it like this untill the end of time! Even if better ways of doing this comes along, we will not change our ways!"
How about "We will change things only when the alternative has been shown to be unambiguously better on a smaller project, and only when changing major versions". I believe in experimentation but the kernel is such an important project that a bit more conservatism is called for.
Sometimes it seems like it's all refining and no development process actually happening. There are plenty of things that seem far more urgent, like releasing a kernel that's actually stable (it's at the stage that I'd go back to 2.4 if my distro didn't have so many things depending on 2.6).
His point is that 22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU, more than (pulling a number out my ass) any 3 other "authors" (or organisations) put together, wheras less than 1% is Linux. If you want to call it GNU/MIT/KDE/..., go on, but if you're going to call it by a single thing, that should be GNU, not Linux.
The key word there is "updated". Something that is updated every week, and where this week's article only makes sense this week (as opposed to a website where someone adds to it, but the added page "should" have been there all along), is not a typical web page. The web was seen as something where you wrote the pages and put them there, and the only reason to add to it was if there were new facts or things you hadn't put in the first time. Like a book, not a magazine. Blog sites are different from that.
I think those require too much intelligence to catch on. Blogging only requires a life, and not much of one at that.
Because he makes more that way. How many IPs could he get himself, and how long before they were caught? Wheras this way he's getting $25 for everyone who uses it, maybe more if it's per bot, and it adds up to more in the long run.
Any server worth its salt will be using SSL which is practically unbreakable (in that it would cost far more in terms of the computer power needed to break it than you could ever make). It's not a constant thing, 0xA3 could stand for entirely different cards on different hands. Methinks you need to learn more about encryption.
You find me one and I will. Besides, typical users can't afford the amount of hardware redundancy a mainframe has.
1) .net still runs on at least 3 platforms thanks to Rotor, making it 2 better than Java
2) All the classes that were submitted for EMCA standardisation are released, they don't look to be missing anything important. I've seen plenty of perfectly good mono programs, which wouldn't be possible if mono was missing important classes.