[Gllug] Gnu is not Unix

[John Hearns]

Actually, my subject is Linux is Not Unix

Thankyou to Damion for a reasoned and thoughtful reply to my rather rude 
outburst for a few days ago.
I'm starting a new thread, as that thread has been deemed ripe for 
termination.


One thing I'd like to pick you up on Damion is the use you make of Unix 
and Linux. Your reply flips back and forth interchangably between them.
Bear with me please - the distinction is important.


You make a point that Unix is not playing 'catch up' with Windows, and 
has been ahead for many years. This is indeed true - commercial Unices 
have had the features needed by commercial and high performance 
applictions for many years.
But please think of Linux as distinct - it is only in the last few years 
that Linux has got these features (say Logical Volume Management) and 
this has meant that Linux has gained a huge amount of ground in these 
markets. Just think back to (say) the 2.2 kernel days. Would you REALLY 
expect a business to run (say) a huge Oracle database on a Redhat 4.2 
system? (version chosen at random).
Contrast with today, where you could be confident to run (say) Oracle on 
  Redhat or SuSE.


My second point is that we should pay attention to naming Linux as 
distinct from Unix. It really isn't some pedantic point which we can 
argue about over beers sometime.
It has vital implications - which we see being played out at the moment 
in the SCO court case for instance.
I'm no lawyer, so I may have the following wrong. But the gist of it is 
true.
Unix is a trademarked and copyrighted operating system. You need a 
license to use it. You can even use it free of charge (Open Solaris).



Linux is of course trademarked and copyrighted too (GPL license is a 
copyright) )

Linux is an open source Unix work-alike. It is a POSIX compliant 
operating system. The OS kernel is released under the GNU GPL.
It is intended to work with the GNU tool suite, the utilities released 
by the GNU Foundation and others under the GPL.

So under the hood Linux is not Unix.
and in fact we have people on this list (Hi Richard) who have worked for 
commercial Unix companies to port in the sometimes superior GNU (Gnome 
etc) tools to their OSes.

And getting to my final point - Linux has romped ahead in many markets, 
including "big iron" because of its open source nature.
You can get in there and discover what that kernel is doing. And I've 
done that on many occasions. Getting my hands dirty trying to discover 
why memory use was going up and up - looking at slab allocation as a for 
instance. Or looking at the code in network drivers to discover what is 
producing a certain error message.

We must not lose sight of this.














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