[Sussex] modem connection

[Geoff Teale]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 22:31, Tony Austin wrote:
> Yes, but wasn't it Emacs that Richard Stallman wasted all his efforts on
> whne he should have been writing a kernel?  Then we could have had Stallix
> instead on Linux!

:) 

Well..Hmmm... I think, if you look at the output of the GNU project
between 1984 and the present day, the late delivery of the kernel is
forgivable.   I've heard a lot of people argue against it, but when RMS
talks about it being GNU/Linux he has a point.  Fundamentally nobody
would be using a Linux system right now without the work of the GNU
project.

The kernel is late because they made a decision to follow a more complex
route (which was harder to debug) than Linus did.  In the LINUX
community we often assume blindly that Linus's design was best and mock
Tannebaum for criticising it.  Linus's design was the quickest and
easiest to implement, but had it no have occurred the HURD may have had
a lot more support and would have been finished years ago.  

When I look at my PC right now I see the following components provided
by the GNU project:

GRUB
glib
GlibC 
GCC 
gdb 
bash 
grep
tar
GIMP
Emacs
ncurses
GNOME
gtk
pth
gtk+
gtk2
gtkeditor
Guile
gzip
indent
less
lilypond
nana
nano
nautilus
Gnome-Find
patch
queue
Gnotepad+
libsigsegv
nethack
Classpath
ClasspathX
ghostscript
barcode 
cvs
sed
m4
mdk
parted
GNU scientific libraries
GNU SQL
sysutils
awk
make 
autoconf
bc
gdbm
gettext
binutils
bison
ddd
a2ps
cpio
global
glpk
libtool
aspell
autogen
automake
ghostview
git
3dkit
abdabi
acct
ACM
groff
ACS
adns
anubis
arch
GNU PG (GPG)
GNUcash
AUCTeX
bool
calc
ccaudio
cgicc
checker
cim
clisp
commonc++
cons
coreutils
cpp2html
cssc
GNUscape Navigator
dejaGNU
dia
diffutils
dld  
ed
elib
enscript
fileutils
findutils
Gnumeric
finger
fontutils
g++
g95
GNUmp
gcal
gcl
GNUStep
gpaint
GPhoto
RCS
readline
rx
screen
sharutils
shellutils
smail
spell
termutils
textutils
time
units
uucp
wdiff
wget
xaos
xinfo

... if that's a waster of time then I struggle to see how it could have
been spent more productively.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation