Re: Intro to GNOME and the FSF

[Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang ultim net>]

> As long as the FSF continues to behave as if "credit is due" only ever to 
> the FSF (I'm being charitable -- I still firmly believe that RMS's 
> "GNU/Linux" crap is intellectually dishonest, if not outright attempted 
> theft; but see e.g. RMS's explanation of why it's "reasonable" to 
> acknowlege the FSF but not BSD or XFree86 components of the Linux Operating 
> System) I must reject this argument.

Perhaps you are taking your information from slashdot.org, but it seems
you need to read www.fsf.org. Because what you advance is non-existent.
The FSF and RMS don't want to get the credit to the system in
itself. They want to make sure that everyone understand that the
components they developed were made to build an entirely free system.
And that this system happen to be what most of the people call "Linux",
while it is actually GNU/Linux.

Another way of understanding this is by a counter-example: the future
Amiga OS will be based on Linux-the kernel. Would you still call that
system Linux ? 
Linux is only the kernel whereas the other main parts of the system
(GCC, the GNU C Library, bash, less, gnu tar, gzip, bison, yacc, 
gas, GNU ld, ...) are part of the GNU project. You could have those same
utilities running on top of the FreeBSD kernel and still call this GNU
(if they are all part of the system you are running), same thing for
Hurd. But you certainly can't call "Linux" every system based on
Linux-the kernel.

Moreover, the system the FSF wants to build is not meant to be "just
another system", it's meant to be a completely FREE system, no matter
where the components are coming from as long as they are free. This is
why components such as XFree86 are considered part of that system as
well. So the issue is not really "credit", it is more of "freedom".

The fact that FSF wants to get credit for their components is more of a
way to fight for freedom, so that the software that people use from them
are recognized as "components of a free system that are guaranteed to
be free (thanks to the "viral" part of the GPL)".


W
-- 
A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs.