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Proposal: GNU ships a working operating system that someone not a member of GNU wants to use, or they give this nonsense up. "But RMS made the C toolchain work

by asolove 15y ago

Proposal: GNU ships a working operating system that someone not a member of GNU wants to use, or they give this nonsense up. "But RMS made the C toolchain work" you say. Great, and lots of electric engineers made my computer work, but their names aren't on the operating system, because that's a different level of work. Everything we've seen from GNU shows that RMS can make wonderful tools for his own use, but not a particularly coherent operating system for anyone else. So he (and GNU) get credit for the C toolchain, and get credit for Emacs, and don't get credit for Linux. Until they build one that we would like to use. Then they can call it what they want.

nobody314 15y ago
Is there a distribution of Linux built with say Intel's icc compiler and using their standard library? Then we can remove emacs and have InteLinux
- viraptor 15y ago
  You'd also need mawk instead of gawk, imake instead of make, etc. etc. - there's loads of those little programs which don't have 100% compatible replacements.
skeptical 15y ago
Not that I agree with RMS's naming insistence, but you cannot refer to the kernel as 'the operative system'. The C toolchain is the tip of the iceberg, there's X, multiple desktop environments, the core utils, VMs and programming language interpreters, etc. They all ship in your operative system, and just to put it in perspective, even open/libre office alone represents a larger bulk of code than the kernel. I'm fine with the name 'linux'. But we should indeed acknowledge that we call it Linux mostly for historical reasons, not because it's the most fair name.
mindslight 15y ago
It's not just the "C toolchain", it's the whole userland. GNU is most of that higher level user experience; Linux is the lower layer you mentioned. (Then again, I might be more inclined to say I run "GNU" if the FSF wasn't so damn ossified.)

by asolove 15y ago

nobody314 15y ago

Is there a distribution of Linux built with say Intel's icc compiler and using their standard library? Then we can remove emacs and have InteLinux

viraptor 15y ago
You'd also need mawk instead of gawk, imake instead of make, etc. etc. - there's loads of those little programs which don't have 100% compatible replacements.

skeptical 15y ago

Not that I agree with RMS's naming insistence, but you cannot refer to the kernel as 'the operative system'. The C toolchain is the tip of the iceberg, there's X, multiple desktop environments, the core utils, VMs and programming language interpreters, etc. They all ship in your operative system, and just to put it in perspective, even open/libre office alone represents a larger bulk of code than the kernel. I'm fine with the name 'linux'. But we should indeed acknowledge that we call it Linux mostly for historical reasons, not because it's the most fair name.

mindslight 15y ago

It's not just the "C toolchain", it's the whole userland. GNU is most of that higher level user experience; Linux is the lower layer you mentioned. (Then again, I might be more inclined to say I run "GNU" if the FSF wasn't so damn ossified.)