Sandip Bhattacharya said on Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 11:22:10AM +0530,:
Just curious, is calling a piece of software "GNU software" instead of "Free software" diminish the intentions of FSF?
As far as I see, the nomenclature has two purposes:
- Giving the term Freedom enough credit.
- Giving FSF enough credit.
There is something the GNU project, whose objective is to create the GNU operating system. That project has everything required to run a full fledged operating system. That project uses the Hurd kernel, and currently, the only distribution based on GNU/Hurd is Debian.
The GCC, bash, *everything* in coreutils package, the glibc, etc. are part of the GNU Project. GNU software is software which is part of the GNU project.
Your software need not be GNU software to be free. To make it free, it is sufficient that you release your software under a free license.
But, all GNU software *is* free software.
HTH,