that old GNU/Linux argument

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 26, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> 
>>> What do you mean "other than the Hurd"?
>> 
>> I mean "except for the Hurd", "save for the Hurd", or however you'd
>> like to phrase the act of taking a set with hundreds of elements, and
>> applying the same predicate to all but one of them.

> I don't mean the semantics, I mean philosophically.  Why would you
> except the one thing that deserves to be called GNU from this
> discussion?

Err...  I don't know how you got this idea that GNU was supposed to be
just a kernel.  GNU is an entire operating system, that Linux
developers happened to borrow to complete theirs, because all they had
was a kernel.

If someone not interested in the kernel Hurd shouldn't be interested
in GNU or any of the GNU/Hurd distros out there, then someone not
interested in the kernel Linux shouldn't be interested in GNU+Linux or
any of the GNU/Linux distros out there.

> And yet, there is still something that _IS_ the GNU project's OS, that
> people can use if they want to use something named GNU.  But,
> overwhelming they pick some other project instead.

Some other project that is nearly as much GNU, indeed.

-- 
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}