John Burton wrote:
You can go back to the "Text Book" definition from Andrew Tennebaum (sp?) who wrote the text book on Operating Systems used by most CS courses. That definition is pretty close to what John originally described. This parallels my original question of what causes people to claim the O/S is "GNU/Linux". While I certainly agree that there are alot of GNU tools packaged with Linux, those tools are also used by alot of other O/Ss that people are not making similar claims about...
It's Andy Tanenbaum and in 1992 he wrote a scathing post on Linux. Linus responded and the exchange continued with a few others chiming in for over a week, not unlike the current discussion. Andy's primary complaint about Linux was that it wasn't a micro kernel operating system and Linus called the assertion brain dead I believe. The discussion became quite impolite but they apparently agreed that the kernel and its interface and management software (including the file system) were the operating system and everything else was something else. The exchange can be found at www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html if you're interested in historical trivia.
John Cornelius -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
