On Tuesday 01 Mar 2005 12:38 pm, Philip Tellis wrote:
Sometime Today, JS cobbled together some glyphs to say:
Supercomputing is a area where Monolithic systems are just not suitable. `Distributed OSes`, are far more advanced than Clustering. Future supercomputing wont be based on `clusters`.,
snip
One question. Let's agree that the OS is GNU (as in the operating system named GNU) and for the time being it uses the kernel named
Linux.
So, we call it GNU/Linux. However, we all know that for the end
user,
the OS alone is not sufficient. End users want windowing systems
and
graphics and mouse control and multimedia and what not. These are,
of
course services provided by the X server and windowing system
through
direct kernel calls in most cases. The entire operating system (ie,
the
software that makes the computer system operational) from the end
user's
point of view is really X11 (or X.org)/GNU/Linux.
In today's age though, one also needs pretty graphical email and web clients, so we add Mozilla (because Opera isn't Free). When I say Mozilla, it would encompass Firefox/Thunderbird if that's what you prefer. The operating system is now Mozilla/X/GNU/Linux, and I
think
that's fair.
In fact, we could prolly do away with most of the GNU part. We need glibc, the dynamic linker and loader. No need of a compiler, no
need of
a shell (unless you have shell scripts). You'll prolly need a
python
and perl interpreter, but I can't really think of anything else
(correct
me if I'm wrong). So the operating system (again, from the end
user's
point of view) is now Mozilla/X/gnu/Linux.
I'd like to state again, so that there is no confusion. I'm looking
at
the operating system from the end user's point of view, and not from
the
computer scientist's point of view. I am (or at least have been) a computer scientist.
X, Mozilla, Apache as also important projects and equating them to the core GNU system is to confuse the issue. This is not a new argument. What this argument misses is that none of these appendages can be compiled or distributed as freely as on GNU systems without depending on commercial libraries. You should think of the situation where X, Mozilla, Apache, or for that matter Linux kernel get distributed without the GNU system, and get compiled with Borland, Visual Studio etc. Then people will relaize that GNU is not just an appendage, it is indispensable and others cannot even be implemented as free software in the real sense without GNU. Others are appendages, kernel and GNU are not. That is why there is no need to go on appending p/q/r/s/GNU/Linux. GNU + Linux is enough, and FSF's claim is legitimate.
So the point is, why dont people become fair and credit an indispensable contribution of FSF?
BTW, I also dont think that the kernel Linux will become obsolete. It is also getting adaptable to different environments. Another argument why Linux kernel will not be obsolete is because, history shows that bad technologies do not disappear just because they are technically bad. If that were the case vulnerable M$ would have perished long ago.
-- Nagarjuna