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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> That's entirely because 30 years ago RMS's ego wouldn't let him admit that something he had no part of was becoming popular

Just a reminder that Linus was inspired by the existence of Minix and by the GPL. So RMS had an important influence on Linux's success. "Influence" =/= "role", but is generally (and in this case) a "part".

None of this justifies the dogged pursuit of the "GNU/Linux" nonsense , but I do think this is an important clarification.

BTW apart from RMS himself I've never heard a single person refer to "GNU/Linux" except in a joking fashion, and I hang out with a bunch of people you'd think would, if anyone took it seriously.

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I just meant that RMS was not a code contributor to Linux, and that his primary motivation for insisting on "GNU/Linux" was ego and jealousy.

Some people do call it GNU/Linux officially, such as the Debian Project, but casually yeah it's not really used so much because its weird and awkward to say. 99% of the world just calls it Linux and that's fine.

Maybe I'm out of the mainstream, but his dogged insistence on it is pathetic. It actually annoys me when I see "GNU/Linux" every time I log into Debian. It feels less like a tribute to the GNU project and more like giving in to his browbeating.

Honestly, if RMS were less of a jerk about it, I'd feel the other way: he and his organization did a lot, and it'd be great of Debian to credit them. But his juvenile bizarre obsession with it, at least for me, is a perfect example of the backfire effect.

I don't really have a horse in this race; the insistence on GNU/Linux seems silly to me and misunderstands branding pretty severely. But to RMS's larger point, a kernel is not an operating system and the Linux userland exists because of the GNU project. This is less true in CURRENT_YEAR when plenty of Linux offerings are entirely GNU-free, but for most of the history of the Linux project, virtually all distributions used GNU libc, gcc, etc, etc, etc.

Don't worry: I wasn't disagreeing with that part of your comment, or actually the comment in general.

RMS, the FSF and the GPL have had a phenomenal impact on software. But apart from RMS's own shortcomings, the result of that phenomenal impact is that his role is diminshed, to a de minimus level.

It's like Tim Berners-Lee: massive impact on the world but by now no real role. Nothing wrong with that (especially when it's such a nice person as TB-L).

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