2006/10/10, Mrugesh Karnik mrugeshkarnik@gmail.com:

On Tuesday 10 October 2006 16:19, Nagarjuna G. wrote:

Tell me something. Some people who are 'fans' of GNU, go to such lengths as to call all the software that's been licensed under the GPL, GNU software. Now if I write some software and use GPL for it, I'd most certainly not be willing to accredit it to GNU. Why should I? Like Linux said, "Authors matter." By using the term GNU/Linux, it seems as though Linux is just a part of the GNU project. It is not.

Linux is not part of GNU project, that is why it is not GNU Linux (softwared from GNU project has names like that GNU Emacs, GNU grub, GNU compiler collection... ) GNU/Linux (pronounced GNU slash Linux) means GNU+Linux.

Just because

someone uses your tools to build their own software does not mean that you own that software.

Linux developed a kernel and GNU project build tools around that is a wrong idea. If you had done some reasearch about the rigin you would have realised it. GNU project was started to build a complete Free Operating system and they started replacing parts of unix and they reached a point when they replaced most parts for a Unix like system except for the kernel. At that time Linux was not released and there were no kernels available as Free Software (the original BSD license was not Free Software) so they started building their own kernel replacement called Hurd. But when Linus Torva;ds released his kernel under GPL v2 it filled that gap and we didn't have to wait for Hurd to finish to have a complete Unix like system.

So instead of adopting Linux as GNU's official kernel (since it tries to be upto Unix while hurd tries to improve upon Unix ideas) Linux was combined with the rest of the GNU system to make a comple Unix like Operating System and it is called GNU-slash-Linux clearly meaning GNU+Linux (as opposed to GNU Linux would mean GNU's version of Linux). GNU project gave creadit to linux as without it we would not have the complete system and it is an important contribution.

Linus torvalds didn't write the system to have a complete Free Operating system, but it was started as a college project. The motivation is different that freedom. So when you remove GNU from picture the history is twisted. The reason why the Free Software movement was started not because programming was fun but because we respect users Freedom and there was no Free operating systems available, so we wrote one.