If you have to hector people into using your terms, then you've already lost. Not that it makes any sense. Are we going to add every organisation involved to the name? Why is GNU special? If they want attribution they should have put it in their licence.
The name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
On the contrary, sometimes the terms used do matter, whether they are a name or not. That's why FSF informs people why they prefer to use the terms like "Free Software" instead of "Open Source". It might not matter now that everybody switched to the web but 20 years ago this talking about Open Source lead to, among others, the so-called "Shared Source Initiative" that was neither fish nor fowl.
Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible.
*) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.
Are you saying it's not a major political defeat when a government officially renames "videosurveillance" to "videoprotection" across the country (France)? I'd recommend rereading Orwell's 1984 if you haven't in a long time.
GNU is special because without them, the whole system wouldn't exist. They did:
1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system.
2. Most of the ideological work
3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too)
They're the original "inventor."
Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that.
Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software").
> _but without Linux, Hurd would still eventually be ready_
"eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)
* The concept of a share-alike license (invented by the FSF as far I know) was critical for the world at the time. I think we'd see models like MacOS (built on top of formerly open-source code), rather than Ubuntu.
* The ideology behind it was critical as well. You might not agree with everything Richard said in the eighties, but everything else derives from it, either as an incremental change or as a response.
One more major contribution -- which I do attribute to Linus -- was how to structure effecitve communities. The FSF development model consisted of a few individuals doing heroics.
GNU/Linux was really the minimum viable product to iterate from.
The GPL certainly does require attribution in the licence; it's not all that clear how it could work otherwise given that copyright relies upon copyright holders suing for copyright infringement.
I'd like to give a practical argument as to why the term matters beyond attribution: There's several incompatible userspaces for Linux.
GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem.
Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.
There's a funny tyler1 quote (popular LoL streamer) about how oftentimes he meets fans and they'll say something like "Haha remember that time I won this game against you doing this?" He responds absolutely not, you will always remember that game as the one time you won against someone famous, for me it was like any other day being famous.
Seeing an entire thread of people not just being petty, but dogpiling onto a five minute conversation that happened in 2001 gives me the same sort of feeling. There is absolutely no way RMS remembers or cares about this one dude giggling to himself over this !GNU operating system.
It would be much funnier if Twitter wasn't completely incapable of chilling for five seconds.
This was basically my original take on the tweet. But after reading the whole thread, there is quite a bit more to the story that makes it interesting (to me at least).
Dunking on RMS in one 5min conversation is only slightly amusing. But getting publicly harangued by RMS for something petty, then spending the next year assembling a working Linux system with no GNU software (which required personally writing some of the parts), all for the purposes of catching RMS in his pettiness the next year, that is a pretty cool story. Still mostly about 1-upping someone in their pettiness, but at least real effort was put into it! :)
As an aside, the "I am going to build this just because I can" attitude is one of my favorite parts of software development. The barriers to entry are so low and the field of possibilities is so wide that it is really fun to see what folks come up with (and hack on stuff myself). Even if 90% of everything is crap...
Funny that this would be used in defense of Stallman, a zealot who built his whole public personality on supposed "speaking truth to power". He literally called Microsoft "the Great Satan."
He certainly suffers from speaking truth to power. Bill Gates suffered no consequences for flying on the lolita express (other than maybe a divorced wife) while Stallman was canceled because of some fairly mundane commentary on Epstein.
It's an odd artefact of American culture that statements made by people who stand to gain nothing materially and potentially lose a lot (e.g. Stallman) are so frequently given less weight than those who have a strong financial interest (Microsoft's "we love open source now no really").
Zealot or not he's also a huge asshole, petty, rude, and extremely inconsiderate. I think most people who enjoy dunking on him enjoy it because he's such an unpleasant person.
It must be frustrating for RMS that his dream of a free software OS was realised in the form of "Linux", but I'm pretty sure that one of the freedoms that flow from a free software license like the GPL is the freedom to call the software whatever you like. Thus I'm free to distribute an operating system that contains a tonne of GNU software and then put the name Linux on it, and the license allows me to do that. If RMS had realised that the name was so important, maybe he would have added a restrictive naming clause to the GPL.
I find this an incredibly odd thing to be so pedantic about. If your mission is truly free and open software, then it's kind of at odds that you would be such a stickler about what people are calling it.
> Eventually RMS said something like "Okay, well, you proved a point. However, this is a pretty rare occurrence; on practically all machines, the GNU system..."
I mean, cool story/heckle aside, RMS wasn't exactly wrong here ... heck the guy even admitted himself he had a hard time working around the "no gnu" requirement, and had to bootstrap his own tools to make it happen.
Also I get the whole "FSF are dicks for punishing sr.ht for saying Linux - Linux is not always GNU" sentiment, but even disregarding the earlier point, FSF is pretty clear in their criteria here, and it's not about labelling all linuxes as GNU/linux:
> Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux
Whether you agree or not with that rule being useful, I'd say in terms of criticising sourcehut's wording, then that's pretty accurate criticism. I don't think the rule was misapplied here.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 87.0 ms ] threadThe name really doesn't matter. If you think that publicity and fame is important maybe you should be in show business, not OSS.
Also, the concept of winning or losing here is meaningless. For one thing, they already won, in the sense that FLOSS is omnipresent. It's a completely different world than in the 90s. On the other hand, whether the GNU project itself is more or less popular does not change its value: it's a result of selfless work of thousands of volunteers worldwide that made our lives easier* and made many things possible.
*) Not just Linux folks but also, say, Solaris admins in the 90s - at some point you'd begin by installing GNU utils to make the system more usable.
1. Most of the technical work on version 0.1 of having a working system.
2. Most of the ideological work
3. Most of the legal work (Linux is GPL too)
They're the original "inventor."
Linus finished building it, but without Linux, Herd would still eventually be ready, and we'd have the same thing, only a couple years later. I'm not trying to downplay this contribution; Linus and Linux are pretty special too. However, Linux wouldn't have happened without GNU; Linus could not have created all of that.
Many people have since improved upon it. Like the Ship of Theseus, their original work is a tiny portion of the system in 2022. However, without them, the whole system would not exist. If that didn't happen, even things like Android, many iterations later, couldn't exist, at least in anything in their present form. "Open source" wouldn't exist either (which was created as a counter to "free software").
It's hard to overstate this contribution.
"eventually", however with "if" we can imagine a lot of things. It could also been said that "if Linux didn't exist then maybe BSD would rule the world" ;)
* The concept of a share-alike license (invented by the FSF as far I know) was critical for the world at the time. I think we'd see models like MacOS (built on top of formerly open-source code), rather than Ubuntu.
* The ideology behind it was critical as well. You might not agree with everything Richard said in the eighties, but everything else derives from it, either as an incremental change or as a response.
One more major contribution -- which I do attribute to Linus -- was how to structure effecitve communities. The FSF development model consisted of a few individuals doing heroics.
GNU/Linux was really the minimum viable product to iterate from.
GNU/Linux refers to the userspace used by most distributions, and anything compatible with it. It supports most of POSIX and implements a plethora of extensions on top of that, making it a unique and distinctive platform. There's several projects that add a significant amount of things to the GNU/Linux ecosystem that aren't GNU and are essentially grandfathered in, but it still remains the same ecosystem.
Compare this to Android (which doesn't even mention Linux in the name of the platform!) or musl/busybox-based platforms, or the (now defunct) GNU/kFreeBSD platform. All of them either don't try to be compatible at all, or only implement "just enough" compatibility with the GNU ecosystem to run most things that use its features, depending on their needs. It's useful to distinguish this.
With subplots of thanking people for t-shirts... FFS!
I remember being annoyed as well by the GNU/Linux thing.
All that preaching (was RHS the original SJW?) pushed me to experiment with BSD.
I also enjoy using Alpine quite a bit (even if it might have some GNU packages)
Seeing an entire thread of people not just being petty, but dogpiling onto a five minute conversation that happened in 2001 gives me the same sort of feeling. There is absolutely no way RMS remembers or cares about this one dude giggling to himself over this !GNU operating system.
It would be much funnier if Twitter wasn't completely incapable of chilling for five seconds.
Dunking on RMS in one 5min conversation is only slightly amusing. But getting publicly harangued by RMS for something petty, then spending the next year assembling a working Linux system with no GNU software (which required personally writing some of the parts), all for the purposes of catching RMS in his pettiness the next year, that is a pretty cool story. Still mostly about 1-upping someone in their pettiness, but at least real effort was put into it! :)
As an aside, the "I am going to build this just because I can" attitude is one of my favorite parts of software development. The barriers to entry are so low and the field of possibilities is so wide that it is really fun to see what folks come up with (and hack on stuff myself). Even if 90% of everything is crap...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwz_vMdxmDU&t=669s
He certainly suffers from speaking truth to power. Bill Gates suffered no consequences for flying on the lolita express (other than maybe a divorced wife) while Stallman was canceled because of some fairly mundane commentary on Epstein.
It's an odd artefact of American culture that statements made by people who stand to gain nothing materially and potentially lose a lot (e.g. Stallman) are so frequently given less weight than those who have a strong financial interest (Microsoft's "we love open source now no really").
If Google one day replaces it with Zirkon, even less.
Yet these people get full of themselves bashing GNU for them having Linux at all.
I mean, cool story/heckle aside, RMS wasn't exactly wrong here ... heck the guy even admitted himself he had a hard time working around the "no gnu" requirement, and had to bootstrap his own tools to make it happen.
Also I get the whole "FSF are dicks for punishing sr.ht for saying Linux - Linux is not always GNU" sentiment, but even disregarding the earlier point, FSF is pretty clear in their criteria here, and it's not about labelling all linuxes as GNU/linux:
> Avoids saying “Linux” without “GNU” when referring to GNU/Linux
Whether you agree or not with that rule being useful, I'd say in terms of criticising sourcehut's wording, then that's pretty accurate criticism. I don't think the rule was misapplied here.