a long rebuttal to the Linux-is-the-engine fallacy

[Alexandre Oliva]

Of course such a long message had to leave something out :-(

On Jul 25, 2008, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

> These pieces were thus developed within this environment that combined
> GNU software and Linux.  Just like Linux itself, these other pieces
> were created dependent on GNU infrastructure, and only recently did it
> become possible to use Linux with other low-level libraries instead of
> GNU libc.  That said, even distributions that adopt such alternate
> libraries still include a significant number of GNU components to make
> for a complete functional system.

And then, there's autotools.  In order to get rid of all GNU software,
one must also refrain from using GNU autoconf-generated configure
scripts and configure-generated Makefiles and header files; GNU
automake-generated Makefile templates, and GNU libtool scripts.
Replacements for these tools would probably have to be written,
because converting all the auto-configuration and building machinery
encoded in configure.ac and Makefile.am would be an insane amount of
work.

*That* would be really fun to watch :-)

-- 
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}