Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 26 Dec 1998 14:08:46 -0500 | From | Richard Stallman <> | Subject | Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux |
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If we must name the system to acknowledge all the contributing projects, we're going to end up with a decidedly Entish name. :-)
You are right: we cannot possibly list, in the name of the system, all the projects that wrote programs which turned out to be useful to include in the operating system. There are too many of them. So it wouldn't be valid for any one project to say, "Mention us in the system's name, because we wrote some of these programs".
The operating system should be named from the project that started developing it, the project that went beyond writing individual free programs. The GNU Project did this. We set the goal of *a free operating system*, dedicated years of strenuous effort to that goal, and in the process developed more of the system than any other project. We gave the system the name "GNU" (which is why the project is the GNU Project).
But I think it's proper to add six more characters, "/Linux", to give credit to Linus Torvalds for his contribution. We cannot mention every contributor, but we can mention one especially important contributor. The GNU Project started development of the system, and in a sense Linus finished it.
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