Peter Hicks wrote: > On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 06:45:14PM -0400, Paul M Foster wrote: > > >I agree that the GNU project deserves credit for much of the software we > >use on Linux. However, the argument that we should then make GNU part of > >the name is bogus. Shall we prepend the inventor's name of every > >invention to the name of the invention? Or every piece of software? > >Shall I be called Paul-son-of-Malcolm-and-Alice? Of course, this is a common way of naming children, more or less. Western names ending in "son" or "sen" (Dickson, for example) derive from times and cultures in which a boy's last name was of the form "Xson", with X replaced by his father's name. > >Linus named it Linux. A name is just a name. A name doesn't have to > >describe what something does, where it came from, or anything else. GNU > >gets puhlenty of credit when the license of 1/3 to 2/3 of the software > >on a typical Linux distro is the GPL. > > Linus named the KERNEL linux, but the operating system is more than > just a kernel... Yes, exactly. Linux is not an operating system, it's just a kernel. The complete operating system, in the case of nearly all Linux distributions (including Debian) requires GNU glibc, GNU fileutils, GNU findutils, GNU binutils, GNU bash, GNU etc. etc. etc. to function at all. Paul, you are actually demonstrating precisely the misunderstanding that led RMS to start promoting the term "GNU/Linux". You write as if you think Linux is a complete system that Linus Torvalds invented and named. This is just plain wrong. Craig
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