10.07.13

GNU World Domination, Not Linux World Domination

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 2:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Don’t mistake hens for eggs

GCC

Summary: Remarks on crediting the Linux project rather than the GNU project for what’s clearly the success of the latter (preceding Linux by 8 or so years)

HAVING spent the past week or so collecting positive GNU/Linux stories, I could not help but notice that nobody — almost nobody at all — even bothers to mention the GNU project. It’s the project which Linux essentially came from or got famous through.

Introductions to Linux tend to leave out the “GNU” [1] almost as though the “Linux way” [2] simply means not the equivalent of “UNIX way” but UNIX without all the software tool that GNU developers had replicated one by one for 8 years before Linux even existed. This is unjust. It’s “Linux” which gets the credit for going out to space (more along those lines in [3]), even though it’s usually Debian GNU/Linux that gets deployed outside of Earth after Windows failure. For the uninitiated, Windows failed ISS by catching malware. GNU/Linux does not have such issues [4] and it’s mostly –if ever — used for detecting and analysing malware [5]. Academics and even part-time Mac users choose GNU/Linux for technical advantages [6,7] and for some it is clear that GNU/Linux has won [8], with more people willing to give it a try [9].

Don’t let marketing people twist the success of the GNU project as a success of “Linux” (as in the kernel). This is definitely deceiving and it helps distract people from the philosophy that the operating system really came from, driving us further away from the goals.

Users may not care about “ideological camps” [9], but this is about the name, not the ideology, which users will be free to explore or ignore. GNU Hurd 0.5 is out now [10] (it predates Linux) and the Free Software Awards are still showing that there is more to GNU/Linux than Linux [12]. Glyn Moody recalls the early days of GNU [13] as it’s the 30th anniversary of the project [14] and the FSF, the steward of GNU, is hiring [15]. While the GNU project is three decades old [16,17], Software Freedom Day is only a decade old [18], and the GPL, a cornerstone of GNU which Linux embraced after being proprietary, is still proving to be popular [19], just like the software itself [20].

Don’t buy the media hype. The revolution came from GNU, not Linux. █

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