On Mar 31, 2002 at 14:00, Nikhil Joshi wrote:
Can anyone please give a definition of Linux? Please give a technical definition (highlighting its licensing policy and features) and not like Linux: The best OS around.
The best OS? Heck, no.
Linux is, by the CS definition, an OS. Only. It provides the usual things that an OS provides: scheduling, filesystems, system calls, threading, and whatnot. Hardware interface. It is the basic kernel and modules code as released by Linus. Anything you add in to it, even if you add to the kernel code, is technically part of the OS but not part of Linux until Linus approves it.
I see some confusion in the previous paragraph about the OS and the Linux part of the OS. You can start with the Linux source code (by definition, kernel source code), and if you hack taht on your own or add third-party code, it is Linux derived. It wuold still be Linux, except that Linus needs to approve it.
GNOME, KDE, Pine, sendmail, gcc, ls, etc. are not Linux. They're GNU (or whoever) tools which happen to work with Linux.