Hacker News Reader

Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

doesn't help that gnu manual pages & documentation tend to completely ignore the origins of the tool they are emulating

(compare HISTORY sections of BSD userland vs GNU coreutils ones as one simple example)

The GNU M4 manual has a sizable section acknowledging its precursors: https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/manual/m4.html#History

perhaps the full manual, but the manual page (which is what I specifically mentioned) has quite the opposite:

    $ man gm4 |sed -ne 119,121p
    AUTHOR
           Written by Rene' Seindal.

Part of the point of GNU was to be a fresh implementation with no copyright dependency on Unix.

That doesn’t preclude acknowledging the history of the tool.

... which would be essentially plagiarism in other fields.