Re: GNU within the name (Was: Changes in formal naming for NetBSD porting effort(s))
On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 10:41:46AM +0100, Mathieu Roy wrote:
> You are currently saying that the GNU in GNU/Linux is justified by the
> glibc and not by any other GNU software, because these GNU software
> are common on other unixes.
>
> Why? If you are right that others unixes uses widely GNU software,
> maybe they should consider recognize the GNU part of the their
> system. But that's a different story.
>
> If we follow your theory, it means that if someday another system use
> the glibc, we should remove the GNU from the GNU/Linux name.
Why not?
> It does not make sense: the GNU part of the name shows that the system
> used is the system designed/initiated by the GNU project running with
> the kernel Linux, which is not part of GNU. It does not mean that
> there are GNU software rarely used elsewhere in the system!
Debian had not been initiated by GNU project, IIRC. "Designated" is
closer to reality, but that wouldn't warrant _anything_ - after all,
gcc had been designated as a primary C compiler on a lot of systems,
but that doesn't make it {lots of organizations}/gcc. It doesn't work
in that direction - *contributor* may have a right to make demands, not
the other way round.
And yes, GNU *had* contributed stuff. The main dependency being glibc.
BTW, if you are talking about frequency of use, glibc beats everything
else by far. With X11 and assorted daemons (almost all of them coming
not from GNU) contending for the second place - depends on the type of use.
If we ever get a replacement libc that would really work as replacement...
on such system GNU claims would become much weaker. Not that there was
a serious chance of that happening - drop-in replacement of glibc on Linux
would be a lot of work and so far none of the alternative libc projects had
tried to pull that off.
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