[in a discussion why call the system GNU/Linux, not Linux]
> one can run a linux machine without an X server and lots of
> other parts, but the basic shells and scripting tools are still born out
> of the GNU project mostly.

But this *cannot* be the main reason why Stallman wants the GNU name in
GNU/Linux.

Why? Because it's very easy to object to your statement. Many "Linux" users
do not use any shell or scripting tool - so is it ok for them to call it
simply "Linux"? And what about me, a person who is using zsh (a shell having
nothing to do with the GNU project) and vim (an editor having nothing to
with the GNU project)? And what if Redhat decided one day to switch the
gnu fileutils (the GNU utilities people most often used) with the freebsd
alternatives, like (I think) Mac OSX did? And if the Linux C library will
be replaced (for the 3rd time) by one not from GNU, *then* we could stop
calling it GNU/Linux?

I think I told this story once - I switched to Linux only because of its
X server (which AT&T System V did not have at that time). Not because of
its wonderful kernel, and not because of the GNU utilities. So maybe I
should urge people to call it X11/Linux? As you can understand, this kind
of argument cannot scale, as so-called "Linux" distributions include software
from more and more projects, some of them pretty big.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Saturday, Jan 11 2003, 8 Shevat 5763




 has anybody noticed the
appearance of the string "GNU/Linux" in the output of the latest releases
of GNU's "uname"? (I'm trying the following on my Redhat 8.0 machine)

Uname -s returns just "Linux", as it always did,

        $ uname -s
        Linux

By the phrase "system name" that was used to describe the "-s" option, has
been replaced in the uname(1) manual by "kernel name". Then then went ahead
and invented a new "-o" option (operating system name):

        $ uname -o 
        GNU/Linux

This "-o" option did not exist in any other version of uname, as far as I
know (I think it was added in GNU sh-utils 2.0.12).

In fact, I've been, for many years, using Solaris in which everything had
been replaced by the GNU alternatives (in fact, for the one exception of
glibc, it has exactly the same GNU stuff that most Linux distributions use).
On this machine, uname -s (using GNU's uname, of course) always returned
"SunOS". And they never thought about complaining "why do you call it SunOS,
you should call it GNU/SunOS"...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Saturday, Jan 11 2003, 8 Shevat 5763