just curious: why no mention of GNU?

J.B. Nicholson-Owens jbn at forestfield.org
Wed Apr 13 03:41:24 CDT 2005


[There is an older thread on this issue on Sounder.  In the interests of 
making this material available for future reference in one place, please 
consider following up there.]

nocturn wrote:
> But, it can be argued that Gnome/Xorg/KDE contribute just as much to
> the functionality of the OS (at least as a desktop).  So using the term
> KDE/Linux or Gnome/Linux is also accurate.
> Then we start getting Ubuntu GNU/Xorg/Gnome/Linux 5.04.

A number of people ask questions or raise points that are directly addressed 
by the FSF's GNU/Linux naming FAQ.  Consider 
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many as a response to this point.

> I agree with Linus on this, Linux is an established and easy to
> remember 'brand' name.  We need to establish some recognition to the
> term by Joe sixpack.

This reads like you think it's fair to give all the credit to one man--the one 
man mentioned almost by name by the egotistically named "Linux" kernel (even 
Torvalds was quoted as saying he considered the name egotistical in a Wired 
interview)?  I notice he doesn't object or make any effort to correct 
interviewers from believing the idea that one man put together an entire OS, 
but that doesn't sound fair to me.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#TOChelplinus

 > GNU by itself would have been fine, but history selected the term Linux.

Things are not decided for us by "history", we decide what we wish to repeat.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#lost and 
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#whatgood seem to address this point.

I recommend reading the rest of the FAQ as well.  It's quite informative and 
raises far more important issues such as being fairminded and not just caving 
into popularity, as well as understanding why it is so important to educate 
others about software freedom and why one cannot do that merely by giving one 
individual (particularly Linus Torvalds who shows no interest in software 
freedom) all the credit.



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