[dundee] What's in a name?

[James Le Cuirot]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 09:52:43 +0100
"Arron Finnon" <arron.finnon at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> 
> //begin quote
> 
> I appreciate the intentions of your organization, but the name you
> have chosen for it has the unfortunate effect of denying the GNU
> Project the credit for our system. (See
> http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html.)
> 
> Could you possibly call it the GNU/Linux Society, and give us equal
> mention?
> 
> //end quote
> 
> Arron

Hahaha you should have known better! He is practically famous for doing
that. Anyone who speaks to him needs to do an s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g on
their brain beforehand.

I do understand his reasoning. It's like when people refer to Cygwin as
a Linux emulator. It has nothing to do with Linux. It's not even an
emulator. You could probably call it GNU/Windows. Although Linus
Torvalds disagrees with him on the point, he does state that Linux is
the part of the system you don't see. When you sit down in front of an
arbitrary terminal and you type your familiar commands like ls, cd,
less or whatever, is that Linux? It might be. Most would say that it
is. But it might not be. It could equally be Windows or some GNU-based
BSD or even AmigaOS. Yes, I have used bash, ssh, gcc and the like under
AmigaOS! This is the part of the system we see and recognise.

It is often stated that a Linux distribution comprises of a lot of
other software too. This is true though almost all of it will require
GNU libc in order to run. uclibc is a glibc-compatible alternative but
practically no distributions actually use it.

Despite everything I've said above, I still don't call it GNU/Linux.
Why not? Because it's such a stupid name! RMS really shot himself in
the foot there. If he hadn't chosen such a stupid name, more people
would probably use it. It's not at all catchy and if you even begin to
explain to someone what a recursive acronym is, they'll generally run
away screaming.

I've got a funny story about RMS but I'll tell you later. (-;

Chewi