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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

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

#51

Post by frodwith »

Locke1689 wrote: post #24
frodwith wrote: post #18

If the point is supposed to be "why insist on calling it GNU/Linux when xx% of it isn't even produced by GNU?", it's an ill-made point. Most of the userland (and certainly what we could call the "core" userland, especially in terms of development tools) is GNU software. The system would be pretty unusable libc, gcc, ld, make, etc.

BSD libc and BSD make are pretty much drop in replacements for glibc and GNU make. LLVM is a drop-in replacement for gcc. It seems like it would be pretty straightforward to build a Linux userland without GNU.

My point isn't that there aren't competent replacements. Obviously the BSDs in general have different userlands, as does Solaris, and so forth. But those things -are- the userland on a Linux system.

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

#52

Post by evgen »

forensic wrote: post #33
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.

> GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have.

Chnage that to "GNU re-packaged or re-wrote versions of utilities that had existed for quite a while in the BSD world, but if they hadn't, someone would have just used the BSD version" and you would be closer to reality. GCC is really the only lingering semi-dependency and as clang improves to the point where it takes fewer patches to build around GCC-specific bits of the kernel the remaining contributions will become nice to have but not essential.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by nwmcsween »

Locke1689 wrote: post #24
frodwith wrote: post #18

If the point is supposed to be "why insist on calling it GNU/Linux when xx% of it isn't even produced by GNU?", it's an ill-made point. Most of the userland (and certainly what we could call the "core" userland, especially in terms of development tools) is GNU software. The system would be pretty unusable libc, gcc, ld, make, etc.

BSD libc and BSD make are pretty much drop in replacements for glibc and GNU make. LLVM is a drop-in replacement for gcc. It seems like it would be pretty straightforward to build a Linux userland without GNU.

I don't think bsd libc supports linux specifics such as fanotify and such, the libc is usually tied to a kernel. (I haven't looked at bsd libc so I may be wrong)

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

#57

Post by bxr »

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…

>the whole idea of a Free alternative to Unix

I don't mean to marginalize the gnu project, but there were already free -nixes out there. Starting over from scratch isn't much of an accomplishment other than the license...

>and created the culture and licenses that made it possible

The GPL has ultimately done more harm than good for open source. The only time proprietary software vendors are forced to release anything is when they accidentally mess up because they didn't understand what they were getting into. This happens rarely and when businesses get burnt, they're more apprehensive to do anything with opensource in the future. I know because I still see this happening today.

When people aren't scared of the codebase, they can start using it. If they can modify it without worrying about legal repercussions, they're not afraid to modify it. Sure they don't have to give back, but if you force them to they're not even going to make the modifications in the first place.

If someone wants to build something closed source, they're going to build something closed source even if it means re-inventing the wheel to avoid the GPL. I'd rather have the wheel be a BSD wheel, so even if product X will never be opensource, at least it will be built with good wheels. I'm a realist that knows closed software isn't going anywhere and at the end of the day I'd like all software to be as good as it can be.

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

#58

Post by caf »

zohebv wrote: post #44
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.

I looked at the article and it seems to strengthen the argument for calling it a GNU/Linux distribution. The top contributors as per the chart. 1. kernel 9% 2. gnu 8% 3. kde 8% 4,5 java, mozilla 6% 6. gnome 3% If you combine gnu with gnome, we have 1. gnu 13% 2. kernel 9% Also considering that java/mozilla are platform agnostic, the candidate names we have are linux-gnu-kde OR gnu-linux(-kde) If you are not running K…

Warning: angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument ahead.

It's true that the kernel is loaded all the time (though not usually running more than a small fraction of the time), but so is glibc. It's far from obvious that more cycles are spent in the kernel than are spent in glibc (though of course in both cases the goal is to run as little as possible, allowing more application code to run).

It's also worth considering that only a fraction of the kernel's LOC are even compiled in the average distribution's kernel (are the LOC dedicated to Itanium, Alpha and PA-RISC support really useful to Ubuntu?).

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

#59

Post by bxr »

rwl wrote: post #32

"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…

The author is mistaken, as you point out there wouldn be nothing to look at (well, effectively nothing) if the code from debain was removed. Also the methodology is a bit suspect. The main non-free and contrib repositories are divided along GPL-compatibility lines, so just looking at main doesn't really paint a full picture.
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