4 ms·

If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to th

If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence. The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
On the contrary, sometimes the terms used do matter, whether they are a name or not. That's why FSF informs people why they prefer to use the terms like "Free Software" instead of "Open Source". It might not matter now that everybody switched to the web but 20 years ago this talking about Open Source lead to, among others, the so-called "Shared Source Initiative" that was neither fish nor fowl. Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible. *) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.
southerntofu 5y ago
Are you saying it's not a major political defeat when a government officially renames "videosurveillance" to "videoprotection" across the country (France)? I'd recommend rereading Orwell's 1984 if you haven't in a long time.
- alephaleph 5y ago
  lmao
blagie 5y ago
GNU is special because without them, the whole system wouldn't exist. They did: 1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system. 2. Most of the ideological work 3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too) They're the original "inventor." Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that. Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software"). It's hard to overstate this contribution.
- karteum 5y ago
  > _but without Linux, Hurd would still eventually be ready_ "eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Commercial UNIXes would have kept leeching BSD code rather.
  - blagie 5y ago
    The BSD model of the time had failed: * The concept of a share-alike license (invented by the FSF as far I know) was critical for the world at the time. I think we'd see models like MacOS (built on top of formerly open-source code), rather than Ubuntu. * The ideology behind it was critical as well. You might not agree with everything Richard said in the eighties, but everything else derives from it, either as an incremental change or as a response. One more major contribution -- which I do attribute to Linus -- was how to structure effecitve communities. The FSF development model consisted of a few individuals doing heroics. GNU/Linux was really the minimum viable product to iterate from.
btdmaster 5y ago
The GPL certainly does require attribution in the licence; it's not all that clear how it could work otherwise given that copyright relies upon copyright holders suing for copyright infringement.
mid-kid 5y ago
I'd like to give a practical argument as to why the term matters beyond attribution: There's several incompatible userspaces for Linux. GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem. Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
"It's amazing how much you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry S Truman

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

On the contrary, sometimes the terms used do matter, whether they are a name or not. That's why FSF informs people why they prefer to use the terms like "Free Software" instead of "Open Source". It might not matter now that everybody switched to the web but 20 years ago this talking about Open Source lead to, among others, the so-called "Shared Source Initiative" that was neither fish nor fowl. Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible. *) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.

southerntofu 5y ago

Are you saying it's not a major political defeat when a government officially renames "videosurveillance" to "videoprotection" across the country (France)? I'd recommend rereading Orwell's 1984 if you haven't in a long time.

alephaleph 5y ago
lmao

blagie 5y ago

GNU is special because without them, the whole system wouldn't exist. They did: 1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system. 2. Most of the ideological work 3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too) They're the original "inventor." Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that. Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software"). It's hard to overstate this contribution.

karteum 5y ago
> _but without Linux, Hurd would still eventually be ready_ "eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Commercial UNIXes would have kept leeching BSD code rather.
- blagie 5y ago
  The BSD model of the time had failed: * The concept of a share-alike license (invented by the FSF as far I know) was critical for the world at the time. I think we'd see models like MacOS (built on top of formerly open-source code), rather than Ubuntu. * The ideology behind it was critical as well. You might not agree with everything Richard said in the eighties, but everything else derives from it, either as an incremental change or as a response. One more major contribution -- which I do attribute to Linus -- was how to structure effecitve communities. The FSF development model consisted of a few individuals doing heroics. GNU/Linux was really the minimum viable product to iterate from.

btdmaster 5y ago

The GPL certainly does require attribution in the licence; it's not all that clear how it could work otherwise given that copyright relies upon copyright holders suing for copyright infringement.

mid-kid 5y ago

I'd like to give a practical argument as to why the term matters beyond attribution: There's several incompatible userspaces for Linux. GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem. Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

"It's amazing how much you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." - Harry S Truman