Max Shinn wrote: >> Picking a small set of gurus to credit is unlikely to be a fair or even an >> illustrative process unless the constutuent enabling technologies are all >> listed. Stallman's work is critically dependent upon von Neumann's in >> order to run and to have any portability at all. Similarly, foundation >> architecture for software was needed before unix or GNU could exist. >> Stallman's work is significant, but far from being due the lion's share of >> credit. > Without GNU, there would be no Linux. Without Linux, we would all be using > the GNU operating system (with a Hurd/Mach as the kernel). It seems to me > that, if we call the system by only one name, it should be GNU. However, we > need to give Linux some credit. Linus Torvalds was a genius social engineer. > He knew how to get people to work on his software for him. He told them all > they were working on "Linux". Of course, since GNU was already pretty well > established among advanced users, the developers would say "Hey, I'm working > on writing a new application called 'Linux'", in the same way someone today > would say "I'm working on KDE". They took GNU for granted. After a while, > they just started lazily calling the whole OS Linux, and the name stuck. > It's sort of reminds me of the people who will say they are running the > Ubuntu Operating System... Now you are attributing to malice what I believe cannot. I doubt Linus woke up one day in early 1992 and said, "hey, I am going to take this thing I am writing and use it to subvert the FSF and take over GNU." It did not even start out to be an operating system, but apparently feature creep set in. :) he even said in his original announcement that he was not making anything as fancy as GNU, it would seem that his original intent was to write yet another unix reimplementation from scratch. Today we have Redhat, Ubuntu, SuSE and there are always discussions on which distro came first. I put forward that "Linux" is the first distribution, because as feature creep set in and work on the kernel took ever more time(just ask GNU how hard it is to produce a kernel) Linus changed his mind and instead of writing the whole thing he took his kernel and combined it with the GNU utilities, slapped on a name and released it as Linux(or freax if you believe that story ;)) so there you have it, Linux is just a very early GNU distribution, just like Debian, Yggdrasil or Slackware the only difference is that it came first and sometimes that is all it takes to genericize a brand. like Walkman for all portable tape players, Xeroxing for making a photocopy, Kleenex for a paper tissue or ZipLoc for bags that have a plastic fastner. some companies spend millions of dollars on "awareness campaigns" to insure that people do not use their registered, trademaked and copy written brands generically but it does not always work. Stallman and the FSF have the right to ask people to use the term GNU when referring to a distribution based on their work and they may be in the right; but people are not going to start Scotting their noses when they are cold, or Minoltaing their term papers just because some company asked for it.