Was it? The IBM PCjr shipped in March 1984, and you could hardly call
that a motivation to write a Unix clone :-)
Oh, you mean the $3000 IBM PC 5150 with an 8088, 64K of RAM and one floppy
drive... yes, of course, if it hadn't been for that, Linux would never have
been. And yes, that did ship a few years before GNU existed.
(of course, you could be meaning the IBM 5100 Personal Computer... that was
long before GNU... but hardly anything to be compared to the modern PC
architecture)
<incoherent rant>
Quit arguing about the source of the Linux project, why not just look at
lines of code or dependencies in Linux systems (including in the compilation of
the systems) and see that GNU is still a very significant part. If you
don't like GNU, why don't you go and use BSD - where vendors are free to go
and make their own code branches and not feed fixes back to the main tree.
They don't like GNU either, but they still end up having to use GNU code -
basically, useful free Unix would not exist today in the way it does without
GNU.
Back to the flame war - now we have this system....
The kernel comes from Linus, and is called Linux.
The debugger, compiler, make program, and general development environment come
from GNU. Pretty much all the development utilities. These are essential
in kernel development - the kernel is currently strongly tied to GNU-originated
development utilities.
The shell, shell utilities, file utilities, a number of editors, C library,
etc, all also come from GNU. Even much of the stuff which doesn't come from
GNU wouldn't be possible without the generous GNU GPL. There are equivalents
for some of this stuff from BSD, and it may be possible to build a Linux
distribution which is only, say, 50% GNU in the low-level userspace, however
nobody has tried yet and without the GNU C library it wouldn't run Linux
binaries (and libc4/5 were still based on the GNU C library AFAIK).
The higher level applications come from all over the place, Netscape, X11,
office suites, etc, come from a number of different vendors.
Now, all the application vendors are known since we see them in the
application copyrights and so on. They get all the credit and recognition
they want.
But how about GNU and Linus? Well, Linus named the OS kernel Linux,
quite rightly since it was his kernel. GNU, who contributed more code
towards the environment which made Linux possible than anyone else - well,
they get mostly ignored by users, and their ideology is forgotten. How
important is this? Well that's what the recurring flame war is about.
There are those who look shallowly, and say that GNU has nothing to do with
Linux - they didn't write Netscape, X11 or the Kernel. Hey, gcc, gdb, make,
emacs, bash, etc... who needs them? :-) (only a very small portion of the
GNU applications most Linux applications depend on of course). Even the
Linux libc has always been based on GNU code. So RMS would prefer if, at
the distribution level, people put the name 'GNU' in there to remind
themselves that a significant portion of the code they are using comes from
GNU. (In fact, a great deal more than comes from Linux.) Not unreasonable.
(irrespective of what you think of RMS's ideologies and political views, it
is not unreasonable to refer to distributions as GNU/Linux when such a large
portion of the Linux project has been vitally dependent on the results of the
GNU project.)
So Debian call their distribution Debian GNU/Linux. I'm not sure about RedHat,
they seem to just call it RedHat Linux. However, GPL gives this freedom -
GNU don't and can't require every OS based around gcc/gdb/make/bash/etc to be
called GNU/*. Linus, AFAIK, can't require it to be called Linux either.
It's just a matter of courtesy for distribution makers to recognize the
contribution of GNU as well as the contribution of Linus to their distribution.
</incoherent rant>
And yes, it doesn't belong on Linux-kernel, but neither does the ignorant and
annoying attitude that people think that their systems don't depend at all on
GNU which a number of people have displayed.
David.
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