In 2001, I said “I use Linux” to RMS's face
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The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible.
*) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.
1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system.
2. Most of the ideological work
3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too)
They're the original "inventor."
Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that.
Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software").
It's hard to overstate this contribution.
"eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)
* The concept of a share-alike license (invented by the FSF as far I know) was critical for the world at the time. I think we'd see models like MacOS (built on top of formerly open-source code), rather than Ubuntu.
* The ideology behind it was critical as well. You might not agree with everything Richard said in the eighties, but everything else derives from it, either as an incremental change or as a response.
One more major contribution -- which I do attribute to Linus -- was how to structure effecitve communities. The FSF development model consisted of a few individuals doing heroics.
GNU/Linux was really the minimum viable product to iterate from.
GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem.
Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.
Seeing an entire thread of people not just being petty, but dogpiling onto a five minute conversation that happened in 2001 gives me the same sort of feeling. There is absolutely no way RMS remembers or cares about this one dude giggling to himself over this !GNU operating system.
It would be much funnier if Twitter wasn't completely incapable of chilling for five seconds.
Dunking on RMS in one 5min conversation is only slightly amusing. But getting publicly harangued by RMS for something petty, then spending the next year assembling a working Linux system with no GNU software (which required personally writing some of the parts), all for the purposes of catching RMS in his pettiness the next year, that is a pretty cool story. Still mostly about 1-upping someone in their pettiness, but at least real effort was put into it! :)
As an aside, the "I am going to build this just because I can" attitude is one of my favorite parts of software development. The barriers to entry are so low and the field of possibilities is so wide that it is really fun to see what folks come up with (and hack on stuff myself). Even if 90% of everything is crap...
I mean, cool story/heckle aside, RMS wasn't exactly wrong here ... heck the guy even admitted himself he had a hard time working around the "no gnu" requirement, and had to bootstrap his own tools to make it happen.
Also I get the whole "FSF are dicks for punishing sr.ht for saying Linux - Linux is not always GNU" sentiment, but even disregarding the earlier point, FSF is pretty clear in their criteria here, and it's not about labelling all linuxes as GNU/linux:
> Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux
Whether you agree or not with that rule being useful, I'd say in terms of criticising sourcehut's wording, then that's pretty accurate criticism. I don't think the rule was misapplied here.
With subplots of thanking people for t-shirts... FFS!
If Google one day replaces it with Zirkon, even less.
Yet these people get full of themselves bashing GNU for them having Linux at all.
I remember being annoyed as well by the GNU/Linux thing.
All that preaching (was RHS the original SJW?) pushed me to experiment with BSD.
I also enjoy using Alpine quite a bit (even if it might have some GNU packages)