Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

pedrocr.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 139 posts

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#31

Post by bane »

adharmad wrote: post #25
cookiecaper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the command line a lot, but really, how big of a contribution is cat, ls, find, etc.? It's not like these are extremely complex or difficult programs; the GNU version is still the dominant one mainly because it works fine and it had momentum. I acknowledge that these have grown to be relatively advanced and it may not be an overnight job to rig up a replacement, and I appreciate the effort that has been put in…

What about gcc?

The company that made the table saw that cut the lumber for my house doesn't get partial naming rights to my house either, I don't receive mail addressed

Mr. Black & Decker/Bane

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#32

Post by rwl »

"I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, ... and am considering only the “main” repository, supposedly the core of the distribution, actually packaged by Ubuntu and not repackaged from Debian."

I'm not sure I understand Ubuntu's "main," or what's "packaged by Ubuntu and not repackaged from Debian." Does this mean the author is not counting code that appears in both Debian and Ubuntu? Because I would expect a lot of that code to be GNU, and I would expect GNU code to make up a small proportion of the Ubuntu-only code.

But that must not be what it means, right? I thought nearly all of Ubuntu's "main" was just repackaged from Debian, in which case the remainder would be a very strange sample to draw on.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#33

Post by forensic »

user911302966 wrote: post #17

I think that the GNU+Linux attribution is accurate and deserved. The author of this page thought it fair to use SLOC as his unit of measurement; I think that "fundamentality" is a far fairer unit. Anyone that thinks that "GNU" should be dropped from the "GNU/LINUX" should be using alternate cp, rm, ln, etc. Or just use NetBSD (do this anyway).

The biggest GNU contributions are gcc, gdb and emacs.

Command line stuff is trivial. GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have. The same cannot be said for gcc, gdb and emacs.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#34

Post by mkr-hn »

foob wrote: post #28
cookiecaper wrote: post #9

FSF's insistence on "GNU/Linux" has always been childish, but now it's just silly really. For years the proportion of GNU software that actually gets run has been dwarfed by the code from Mozilla, KDE and/or GNOME, and other major desktop software vendors. The GNU/Linux argument has never been persuasive and I'd say it's high time they let it go.

Just so you know, GNOME stands for GNU Object Model Environment. Not that that negates your point, but I still disagree with you for other reasons. Firefox is in no way part of the operating system itself. I would argue that Bash and the core-utils on the other hand are. Also keep in mind that the GNU Project created the whole idea of a Free alternative to Unix and created the culture and licenses that made it possib…

GNU and the free software movement aren't going to die just because most people think GNU/Linux is a ridiculous thing to call an operating system.

The core of GNU's argument is that they need GNU/Linux so people will recognize the importance of the movement, but the manner of people participating in this naming campaign is completely counterproductive.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#35

Post by phlyingpenguin »

46Bit wrote: post #23

No expert, but I always thought Ubuntu was probably the distro least likely to have a large % of GNU thanks to all the extra stuff that comes with it. Would be interested to see this for Debian or etc.

I think in terms of a standard desktop user's install, a Debian machine configured for usual use is not going to differ all that greatly from an Ubuntu machine. A server config forsaking much of the user-friendly stuff, maybe.

I think my point there is that I don't think actual distribution "names" matter so much as what their intended purposes are for varying the "what" that is measured for this metric.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#36

Post by rwl »

mkr-hn wrote: post #13
masterzora wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the author or the submitter, but it seems to me that this article is more or less in response to FSF's "We developed most of the central components, forming the largest single contribution to the whole system."[1] [1] http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#why

I think it's more useful to look at the impact of a contribution. Apache, KDE, and GNOME are a bigger deal than GNU by that metric. But I also think it's a bad idea to try and put one over another when they all do their part.

I don't know how you measure "impact," but this doesn't sound right to me. If you took away all the GNU code from a GNU/Linux system, my guess is that you would no longer have a working Unix system. I don't think that can be said of the other organizations you mention.

And if you mean social impact, I think it would be hard to overstate the role of GNU in getting the free software movement going. Yes, there is an ecosystem of self-sustaining projects and organizations now; but I have my doubts whether any of that would be there without the initial efforts of GNU.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#37

Post by ajross »

cookiecaper wrote: post #30
adharmad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about gcc?

What about clang? The point isn't that GNU programs aren't useful -- it's just that the claim that GNU is so important it should be included as a mandatory prefix any time anyone mentions "Linux" in a context that is not kernel exclusive is grating and silly.

What about clang? It isn't part of the OS. It can't even build the OS yet. It's a nice project, and it might be a solid competitor to gcc in the near future, but the fact that it exists hardly refutes the point that gcc is a large, crucially important component of a modern Linux distribution.

(I should point out that I too find the whole GNU/Linux tiff silly, but equally silly are the folks who try to write the FSF out of the picture out of spite.)

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#38

Post by rwl »

tedunangst wrote: post #26
ryanpetrich wrote: post #8

Lines of code is a poor way to measure contribution.

Why? It is a reasonable proxy for how long it would take to replace something, and it's the effort to replace something that is core to the "you wouldn't be where you are without us" argument. How would you measure contribution?

I'm not the OP, but one way would be to look at the dependency graph for packages. My guess is that a whole heck of a lot of them depend either directly or transitively on GNU code -- for example, GLibC.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#39

Post by cookiecaper »

ajross wrote: post #37
cookiecaper wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about clang? The point isn't that GNU programs aren't useful -- it's just that the claim that GNU is so important it should be included as a mandatory prefix any time anyone mentions "Linux" in a context that is not kernel exclusive is grating and silly.

What about clang? It isn't part of the OS. It can't even build the OS yet. It's a nice project, and it might be a solid competitor to gcc in the near future, but the fact that it exists hardly refutes the point that gcc is a large, crucially important component of a modern Linux distribution. (I should point out that I too find the whole GNU/Linux tiff silly, but equally silly are the folks who try to write the FSF o…

clang builds Linux as of October. See http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2010-October/0117... .

gcc isn't really "part of the OS" either. Many distributions don't even include it in the default install. Ubuntu is a prominent such distribution.

I'm not trying to write FSF out of the picture. I appreciate their contributions and surely things like gcc, gdb, and emacs are hefty achievements. I am grateful to the FSF and the GNU Project for its legacy and its direct benefit to myself in terms of code provided. However, I don't feel that these contributions entitle GNU to a special prefix on the OS name any more than it entitles KDE, Mozilla, Xorg, or anyone else to a special prefix. I use code from all of those parties and quite appreciate that code, too.

Re: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

#40

Post by mkr-hn »

ajross wrote: post #37
cookiecaper wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about clang? The point isn't that GNU programs aren't useful -- it's just that the claim that GNU is so important it should be included as a mandatory prefix any time anyone mentions "Linux" in a context that is not kernel exclusive is grating and silly.

What about clang? It isn't part of the OS. It can't even build the OS yet. It's a nice project, and it might be a solid competitor to gcc in the near future, but the fact that it exists hardly refutes the point that gcc is a large, crucially important component of a modern Linux distribution. (I should point out that I too find the whole GNU/Linux tiff silly, but equally silly are the folks who try to write the FSF o…

No one wants to write them out of the picture. It's just not realistic to credit all the vital contributors in the name. Why is GNU not content with the CREDITS file?
Post reply on HN