On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, John T. Hoffoss wrote: > On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 23:51:58 -0600, Matthew S. Hallacy <poptix at poptix.net> wrote: > >> Has anyone considered that *GNU* wouldn't be much of anywhere without >> Linux? > > I'll second that one. I don't know about many of the others on this > list, but there wouldn't have been a TCLUG without Linus' kernel. You do know that GNU always had the goal of producing a kernel, right? So I think you would have heard of it eventually. If Linus Torvalds had died in infancy, someone else would have made some kind of kernel and you would still be talking about GNU. Is Stallman ungrateful about Linux? No. He says it is great and it has helped GNU a lot, but I think people exaggerate when they claim that we wouldn't know about GNU if it weren't for Linux. We don't know what would have happened. Also, you are probably unaware of it, but GNU tools were widely used on UNIX systems (e.g., Solaris/SunOS) well before Linux made any headway. Millions of people (tens of thousands at least) were using GNU/Emacs, gawk, gtar (just GNU's awk and tar, but we'd add a 'g' in front to distinguish it from Solaris awk and tar), gcc and others. This was the major use of GNU before Linux came along. Mike