Alexandre Oliva wrote:
It was GNU. GNU, as a system, pre-dates Linux.
As a system of what?
An operating system, whose kernel was still under development. And,
like every other component of the GNU Operating System, still is.
With respect to the quality of the components that are more or less
completed, as a working system GNU might as well stand for "GNU's not
usable" - without someone else's kernel anyway.
GNU was not built on top of Linux. Linux was eventually able to run GNU.
GNU what?
GNU Operating System. That stuff you could get from
prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu long before there were such things as ftp://
URIs.
I don't think anyone ever objected to that being called GNU. The
objection is to the demand that the name be tacked on to other
distributions. As I recall, the GPL explicitly prohibits such demands
being attached to code and won't even permit covered code to be linked
with code formally containing such requirements so it seems in rather
poor taste to make them even informally.
I was more interested in running apache and sendmail at the time and
didn't care if it was bsd, linux, or unix underneath.
Apache?!? You're not going far back enough. Apache is younger that
Linux, IIRC. Certainly much younger than GNU.
Apache wasn't the original name. The code was developed as NSCA httpd
and I'd argue that the subsequent branches of that work and its
companion clients have had more to do with people wanting to run
computers - and any OS - than any other single thing. Before that,
computer science was a pretty boring field without much appeal to
ordinary people. And I'd also argue that if it, or the initial
underlying TCP implementation that it needed had been GNU/GPL with the
associated restrictions, much of the subsequent development that we
enjoy today would never have happened.
sendmail, yeah, I'm pretty sure the GNU Project decided to not
implement its own MTA back in mid 1980's because sendmail was Free
Software, and so the other pieces were designed to just use it.
Sendmail does go back even further, perhaps to the days when there were
dozens of computers on the internet - but without something more
interesting along with the ability to reuse the code it might have
stayed that way.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
--
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx
To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
