RMS, Free software and the Ubuntu CDs

[Florian Diesch]

"Michael T. Richter" <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 16:53 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
>
>     > The problem with RMS and his cohorts is that he comes across as very,
>     > very snide and jealous when other people are successful where he isn't.
>     > He's been snarky and snide toward Linus Torvalds (and Linux as a whole)
>     > because people call this Linux instead of GNU+Linux or GNU/Linux.
>
>
>
>
>     But actually, he *IS* right in doing this. Linux isn't so great
>     only because of the kernel (ie. Linux), but for a great part
>     because of the userland, ie. GNU.
>
>
>
> And X?  What about X?  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that GNU
> doesn't mean a damn in terms of Linux's sudden surge on the desktop without X. 

You need gcc GNU make and GNU binutils to compile the Linux kernel. So
the Linux kernel isn't usable without GNU software. And except for some
mini-distros every modern Linux distribution is build around the GNU
libc. Without it you'll just get a kernel panic after the kernel tried
to start init. Game over.

Would you really call something that isn't operating a "operating system"?




   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>