that old GNU/Linux argument

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 20, 2008, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> That people made this silly and childish mistake of renaming the GNU
>> operating system to Linux is unfair *and* it works against the very
>> evangelization you claim to support.

> There is no such thing as the GNU operating system,
> unless you mean GNU/Hurd, which no-one would call Linux.

Actually, Hurd is the primary kernel of the GNU operating system.  So,
no, GNU by itself pretty much implies the kernel is Hurd.

That said, as I wrote before, when you take out any single component
of the operating system it still remains pretty much the same.

Again, if you wrote a chapter or two in a book containing some dozens
of chapters (say 20 pages out of 500), would it be legitimate for you
to say you wrote a book?

If you had copied some 15 chapters (say some 200 pages) from another
book by another author into this book you might or might not claim to
have authored yourself, would you legitimately claim you're the
primary author of this book?

-- 
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}