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Copernicus is offline Copernicus
2016-04-22 , 07:25
Posts: 1,986 | Thanked: 7,698 times | Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio
#171
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
BSD is no Linux. BSD is proper Unix!
Yes, but it can be made Linux-compatible. That is probably the most important question for Linux-like OSs today.
 

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2016-04-22 , 12:46
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#172
Originally Posted by Copernicus View Post
Oh, I certainly enjoy the products that were created under Stallman's leadership. But I also enjoy the works of Torvalds, as well as those produced at Berkeley, MIT, Bell Labs, and many other places. All these folks have had a hand in producing the modern crop of Unix or Unix-like operating systems; and make no mistake, whether or not actual code has propagated between various versions of Unix, all of them have influenced each other significantly.

I simply find the efforts of one man to try and control the world of open source software to be uncomfortable. I don't want Pierogi to start being called GNU/Pierogi, even though I currently license it under the GPL. Until Linus Torvalds himself changes the name of Linux to GNU/Linux, I will continue to call it just Linux.
Yes, but you DO understand what I am talking about, right?
"Linux" is the thing you can get from kernel.org git repo.
Usually most people need some kind of userland too, that includes even people like me

There are plenty of userlands to choose from, and the GNU kind is the one people usually mean when they think they are using "Linux"
It is not the only alternative though, you can use BSD userland on top of Linux. Or Android userland. Some people even roll their own, either picking/combining from existing OS'es or designing completely own.
(and yes, I have even done that...)

Why I am so insistent on this;
Words are important, and we need to fight the erosion of meaning. Think about the word "hacker" for example, wich nowdays is used by the clueless ilk as synonyme for "cracker"
 

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2016-04-22 , 14:04
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#173
Originally Posted by juiceme View Post
Yes, but you DO understand what I am talking about, right?
"Linux" is the thing you can get from kernel.org git repo.
Usually most people need some kind of userland too, that includes even people like me
Oh, absolutely! Linux is not userland. That's kind of my point: if you want to talk Linux + Userland, you're generally talking a distribution. The problem I have is that GNU is not a distribution; it is more of a philosophy, or better put, a movement. Many software packages have been written within this project; others have been designed in sympathy with it, but outside the project; yet others stand independent from GNU, or even in opposition to it. Software of all these sorts can be found in most distributions. (The Linux kernel itself is most emphatically not part of the GNU project.)

Why I am so insistent on this;
Words are important, and we need to fight the erosion of meaning.
Right. Calling a Linux + Userland OS just "Linux" is an erosion of meaning. Calling a Linux + Userland OS "GNU/Linux" is even worse, as it (a) endorses using the name "Linux" to describe the entire OS, and (b) incorrectly implies that the entire package is subsumed within the GNU project.
 

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mscion is offline mscion
2016-04-22 , 14:35
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#174
Could you folks please clear something up for me. I've never quite understood the gnu of gnu/linux. One way of putting it. If you took the gnu out of gnu/linux, what would you have? For example is the set of commands like "ls", "tail" or "more" part of the core linux or is that what gnu brings. Also, How about vi or vim? vi runs on my android phone but I think that is because I have busybox. So then is busybox a program that simply contains a subset of the gnu utilities. Finally when I think of a distribution like Debian and Ubuntu, is that then linux + gnu + whatever else Debian or Ubuntu has to offer. Where as Andriod is linux + whatever else Android has to offer. Thanks!
 

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2016-04-22 , 14:54
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#175
Originally Posted by mscion View Post
Could you folks please clear something up for me. I've never quite understood the gnu of gnu/linux. One way of putting it. If you took the gnu out of gnu/linux, what would you have? For example is the set of commands like "ls", "tail" or "more" part of the core linux or is that what gnu brings. Also, How about vi or vim? vi runs on my android phone but I think that is because I have busybox. So then is busybox a program that simply contains a subset of the gnu utilities. Finally when I think of a distribution like Debian and Ubuntu, is that then linux + gnu + whatever else Debian or Ubuntu has to offer. Where as Andriod is linux + whatever else Android has to offer. Thanks!
The commands you mention are part of GNU coreutils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Core_Utilities
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2016-04-22 , 14:59
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#176
Originally Posted by Copernicus View Post
Right. Calling a Linux + Userland OS just "Linux" is an erosion of meaning. Calling a Linux + Userland OS "GNU/Linux" is even worse, as it (a) endorses using the name "Linux" to describe the entire OS, and (b) incorrectly implies that the entire package is subsumed within the GNU project.
The '/' implies a combination, so GNU/Linux is 'GNU+Linux' or 'GNU with Linux'. Richard Stallman insists on it because he sees an ethical difference between software using copyleft licensing and that using permissive or propriatory licensing.

Permissive != free
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2016-04-22 , 15:31
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#177
Originally Posted by marxian View Post
The commands you mention are part of GNU coreutils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Core_Utilities
Thank you for that information and reference. So commands like "ls" and "cat" are a "reimplementation" of Unix based commands and are not part of the core kernel. From reading this reference seems like Unix came with its own kernel. Also, I see that GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix. Kind of a weird acronym. Is this a statement of it being free? Also, does writing gnu/linux imply a level of functionality equivalent to Unix? Thanks!
 

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2016-04-22 , 15:33
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#178
Originally Posted by mscion View Post
Could you folks please clear something up for me. I've never quite understood the gnu of gnu/linux.
A lot of the confusion, as I noted above, is that neither Linux nor GNU are correct names for the object being named here. Linux is an operating systems kernel; GNU is a project to create a computing environment constructed totally from "free" source code (with exactly what "free" means being defined by Richard Stallman and his associates).

One way of putting it. If you took the gnu out of gnu/linux, what would you have? For example is the set of commands like "ls", "tail" or "more" part of the core linux or is that what gnu brings.
The funny thing is, all these commands were originally written by somebody, and all of them have their own story. "ls" was in the original AT&T Unix, and versions (with greater or lesser compatability) have been written for pretty much every Unix and Unix-like OS. Same with "tail". On the other hand, "more" was first created for BSD Unix.

Also, How about vi or vim?
One of my favorites. "vi" was created at Berkely as an extension to "ex", which itself was built on a foundation of editors going back to AT&T's "ed". Many extensions, clones, and complete rewrites of vi have been made over the years, including the very nice "vim". "vim" has the rather unique history of originally being written for the Commodore Amiga, based upon the code for a similar editor created for the Atari ST. Only later did it make its way to Unix systems. (BTW, vim is included with every copy of Apple's OS X. )

Finally when I think of a distribution like Debian and Ubuntu, is that then linux + gnu + whatever else Debian or Ubuntu has to offer. Where as Andriod is linux + whatever else Android has to offer.
Ultimately, the people creating a Linux distribution are free to choose whatever they want to add into that distribution. Some distributions strive to maximize the amount of GNU-based or GNU-compatible software (e.g. Debian), some strive to minimize it (e.g. Android), others are more agnostic (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.). And, of course, not only can you find Linux without GNU, you can find GNU without Linux (lots of GNU code is available for BSD, for OSX, for Windows, etc.).

So yeah, the world is complicated out there.
Last edited by Copernicus; 2016-04-22 at 15:53.
 

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2016-04-22 , 15:36
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#179
Originally Posted by marxian View Post
The commands you mention are part of GNU coreutils: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Core_Utilities
They have been reimplemented within the GNU Core Utilites, yes. They existed before GNU, however, and you can find direct derivatives of the originals as well as non-GNU reimplementations of them elsewhere.
 

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2016-04-22 , 15:44
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#180
Originally Posted by marxian View Post
The '/' implies a combination, so GNU/Linux is 'GNU+Linux' or 'GNU with Linux'. Richard Stallman insists on it because he sees an ethical difference between software using copyleft licensing and that using permissive or propriatory licensing.

Permissive != free
Problem is, Linux is not GNU. A Linux distribution may contain elements from the GNU project, but then it'd be better to use the name GNU/Ubuntu or GNU/Fedora.

Android is most definitely Linux, and most definitely not GNU. Debian is almost wholly GNU (except, of course, for the Linux kernel, which is most definitely not GNU). A Fedora distribution will be somewhere in the middle, and any given Arch implementation could be near 100% GNU or near 0% GNU.

Ultimately, just saying a distribution is GNU/Linux is misleading, because you really don't know how much GNU is in there. (Whereas Linux either is or is not in there for certain.)
 

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