Mathieu Roy wrote:
Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com> said:Mathieu Roy wrote: ...When I'm told that a system is running GNU/whatever, I expect first to find there GNU coreutils, GNU bash, GNU Emacs, GNU Compiler Collection, gzip, GNU awk,GNU make, the GNU Debugger, GNU sysutils, GNU tar, GNUpg, GNU grep, GNU mailutils, GNU ncurses, GNU readline, GNU shellutils, GNU wget...you can install these on pretty much any system... is my gaming machine running gnu/win xp? or did we use gnu/solaris at -xxx-?Maybe, yes.
maybe somebody should tell bill g. that there's number of gnu/win xp systems out there (I know that ms doesn't distribute gnu utils but quite a lot of people use win as essentialy poor man unix-like machine (it's kinda funny that poor man's unix machine is in this case more expensive than real unix machine:-))
this GNU narcissism is pretty annoying... where's the freedom RSM is promoting? the software is released under GPL and that's it.You can call that narcissism. In these days, I do not think that the freedom Richard Stallman, via the GNU project, promoted are so famous that we can afford to forgot an occasion to advertise.
and I am all for advertising. everybody should now how great gnu (fsf) is, what rsm did etc.
Nowhere in the GPL it says you have to call your project GNU/something.Is there anybody that ever made that request? You now, it is not about giving to the Linux project, a kernel project, the GNU prefix. It is about naming the system itself, system composed partly, but only partly, of the Linux kernel.
I know nobody is asking for the kernel to be called gnu/linux. but the whole OS is/was called linux as well. even though only a small part of it is what linus (originally) wrote (kernel).
so yes, somebody makes constant requests for linux (OS) to be called gnu/linux.
I don't see any reason why the name of the system shouldn't be chosen by whoever creates the system, no matter how much of the gnu software it includes. even in extreme cases like early mandrake (which was basically redhat). there certainly isn't anything about it in gpl, there is no convention of doing so etc. rsm has absolutely no busines to tell other people how they should call their creations (or even politely ask).
just to clarify: at the same time, if debian is called debian gnu/linux system because debian developers decided that it should be called that then that's it, I don't object to that.
erik