On Mon, 6 Oct 2008, Eric F Crist wrote: > On Oct 6, 2008, at 12:05 PM, p.daniels wrote: > >> Well, in an extended sense, maybe they should. Were it not for the GNU >> platform there wouldn't be KDE (or Linux, for that matter). -pete, >> who's still on the fence about the name change, just trying to play >> devil's advocate > > Not to pick a nit, here, but Linux exists entirely without GNU. A full > linux-based OS is hard to come by without it, however. What does it mean to say that Linux exists without GNU? GNU was needed to make the Linux kernel useful, so Linux might easily not have existed without GNU. Linux has been compiled using GCC for years now. I did read about an OS that combined Berkeley system tools with the Linux kernel -- no GNU. So it can be done, but probably none of us do that.j Mike