Guest Post: Getting Stallman Wrong Means Getting the 21st Century Wrong

techrights.org

4 points·znpy··4 comments

Articles starting with a pseudo-defensive "you will hate on me, but I'm so much stronger than all of this" are rarely worth their time.

This isn't the exception. It meanders from one community the author despises (Linus Torvalds and his followers) to another (Trisquel — evidently a distribution), to another (Microsoft, because nothing lends you street cred like hating on them), and of course, in the end Stallman is just like Assange.

Note that this was published on September 9, two days before the email (September 11), and probably written even before that date.

> But as Stallman said — there is no other operating system than GNU, and “Linux is one of its kernels.”

The other working kernel is WinNT, Hurd is not finished yet.

There have been "GNU" distributions that used non-Linux kernels. There was one that used the Solaris kernel, which at the time was even copylefted. Though with a license that was incompatible with GPL. (I think that Sun didn't want Linux just cutting and pasting stuff like ZFS and Containers into the Linux kernel.)

I'd also be surprised if there haven't been dists that used the GNU commands, but with a BSD kernel.

Debian once had a "GNU/kFreeBSD" distribution.

In light of this, someone at the FSF once referred to WSL1 as "GNU/kWindows".

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