Ron Johnson wrote: > <Sigh> How much do we of XFree? Mozilla.org and AOL? OpenOffice.org > and Sun? AbiWord? Ximian? TrollTech? KDE.org? Uhh... did you mean "owe" instead of "of" in the first sentence? Sorry, I'm just finding it hard to parse that... > It goes without saying that we all use tons of GNU s/w and s/w developed > on GNU tools. However, if most Windows based tools and applications > were written in Borland C, instead of VC, should "the other OS" be > called Borland/Windows? No... You miss the point. Without the GNU toolset, a Linux kernel is just a kernel with no userland components -- useless. You could, in theory, replace the GNU toolset with something else, but pretty much every Linux distro uses the GNU programs, so that's purely a theoretical consideration. In practice, any usable Linux system joins the Linux kernel to the GNU toolset, and so is best described as a "GNU/Linux" system. This is both technically accurate and, as Vineet put it, "credit where credit is due". It is not simply a matter of which compiler is used, but the entire environment (glibc, fileutils, binutils, etc.) that makes it possible for the compiler to run in the first place. That the kernel itself is compiled with GNU's compiler is merely icing on the cake; it makes the argument a little stronger, but would not be much of an argument all by itself. Craig
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