Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 6 Mar 1996 15:21:34 -0500 | From | "Theodore Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Linux isn't an operating system |
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Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 02:11:32 -0500 From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
I would expect that most of the people who speak of "the Linux operating system" think of this as just a minor lack of precision.
But aside from being unfair (which by itself would not be worth fussing about), it also tends to split the community and thus discourage communication and cooperation. When the people who use what is essentially the GNU system think of themselves as "Linux users", and not as "GNU users", often they don't see a reason cooperate with the people who maintain the GNU software. This leads to version-skew and unnecessary incompatibility.
But there *are* two separate communities. The Linux community, is quite rightly, most interested in the betterment of systems which use the Linux kernel. If this means that we have a malloc() which assumes the use of mmap(), and gives us significant performance improvement, naturally the Linux community will be interested in using it.
The GNU community seems to be much more interested in software that works on a wide variety of systems, and if there is one system that all GNU packages are expected to default to building under, it is the Hurd. (I go to Chinese restaurant outings with mib, so I get treated to this sort of Hurd-centricism. Perhaps this is not a fair assessment to others in the GNU community.)
The GNU community seems to be much more concerned with pushing a specific social goal using the GNU GPL as the means towards that goal. Most Linux developers seem to be much more flexible and pragmatic about the enforcement of the GPL. We don't want people making money off our work, so we don't make things available under a BSD/X Consortium style license, but for the most part the GPL seems to have more moral force than legal force. For example, the fact that we have Berkeley copyrighted code (SLIP compression) in the Linux kernel doesn't bother many core Linux developers overmuch. This would probably be a real problem if the copyright ownership of the Linux kernel were vested with the FSF.
Partially related to this is the fact that we don't insist on all of the legal paperwork and centralization of control of the interpretation and enforcement of the GPL into some central organization (like the FSF) that seems to be more of the norm in the GNU community. Speaking generally, there seems to be a much larger number of GPL hard-liners in the GNU community than there are in the Linux community.
One way to help unify the community, and gently encourage more cooperation, is to use the term "Linux-based GNU system" to describe these systems more accurately.
Will it unify the community, or tear it apart? Some of the above differences can (and have) led to religious flame wars, which I for one am not enthusiastic to see again. Can we just agree that the two communities have different goals, and leave it at that?
The use of the term "Linux-based GNU system" has the danger of arousing the ire of those people who feel that all of their contributions to the Linux community are being hijacked to further the political/social goals of the GNU community.
The MIT Science Fiction Society has the motto "we're not fans, we just read the stuff". Likewise, I'd argue that large parts of the Linux community has the attitude, "we're not activists, we just want an OS that works and that we can hack on." The GNU community seems to want to be a community of activists. There is nothing wrong with that, but that's not the Linux community.
I appreciate the work that the GNU community has done, and I hope that it and the Linux community can indeed work together. However, I point to Bosnia as an example of what can happen if you try to force together two communities that really have different goals. One or the other of the communities generally end up having to yield, and that can cause resentments, and built-up resentments have led to very bloody wars.
- Ted
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