Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

They're not all from the Bronx. Some of them are from Brooklyn ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.

Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.

The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.

There is also no requirement that a Linux distribution includes any GNU software at all, should we refer to them as e.g Busybox/Linux?

> The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.

I don't agree with this actually, that's why I didn't even mention this. I believe GNU was indispensable to the wider Linux phenomenon. It's a matter of being fair and technically precise.

Linux is not called GNU/Linux, but most of the distros need be because the three major components are the GNU userland, the Linux kernel and the distro's utilites and customisations.

Is there an OS that uses Linux as the kernel but then no GNU software on top of that? It would be interesting to see, at least.

Isn't android effectively that?

yep

I think Android does that.

you too

me three

Android

Alpine Linux (of Docker fame)

Lots of embedded stuff

yes

> until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top

Not that it invalidates your point, but it has happened.

Alpine Linux (e.g. Docker) and Android

> a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top

Android shot past all the others to become the most popular operating system in the world, in case you didn't notice.

The sentiment of this comment is correct. Free software should be an integrated part of a wider movement for emancipation, and only harms itself by being so pedantic and hermetic. However, I don't really have a problem with insisting on the name GNU/Linux, and that's why I didn't even mention it in particular: I believe it's simply a matter of being fair and technically precise.

>Free software should be an integrated part of a wider movement for emancipation

This is actually what FSF claims to do as far as I understand. GPL is a law hack.

In my opinion the problem with "GNU/Linux" is that there really is no such operating system at all. Debian contains a lot of GNU software, as well as the Linux kernel, but also contains a whole lot of Debian-specific software (most notably dpkg and apt), as well as other software (for example, X.org). If we compare, Fedora contains a lot of the same software as Debian, but also a whole lot of Red Hat-developed Red Hat-specific software (again, it's RPM, dnf, but also things like flatpak which is not specific to any one operating system).

Why do people insist on saying that all of this is one single "operating system" called "GNU/Linux" and that there are different "distros" called Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch, etc., instead of just calling it all a bunch of operating systems? Because these different "distros" are not compatible with each other. They can mostly run each other's binaries, and some configuration knowledge works across them, but other than that they are mostly incompatible. And they are all based on Linux, GNU, and a bunch of non-GNU software.

So if we say that "This is an operating system called Fedora, which is based on Linux and GNU and a bunch of other stuff", instead of "This is a distribution of the operating system GNU/Linux called Fedora" then we would just be better off overall. There is no more reason to fight over the name "GNU/Linux" versus "Linux" since both are pretty inaccurate anyway. There would be no more user confusion about what Linux is, as there seems to be today (e.g. people blame Linux for userland problems, or people expect program X to be packaged and get support for operating system Y because it says "Linux" on the webpage). And things like BSD would seem less foreign if people knew that it's really another operating system instead of being seen as just some weird non-Linux thing.

And if the GNU people ever get around to actually finish their operating system, then they could just call it "GNU" without causing even more confusion

Reply on news.ycombinator.com