Why is Linux more prominent than GNU?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| mbaehrlxer Jun 11, 2015 12:34 AM EDT |
my take on why linux is more prominent than GNU is this:
it has nothing to do with richards ideology. i don't know who could come up with such an idea.
it has to do with circumstance and missed opportunities. before linux, GNU was only accessible to academics and sysadmins who worked in large companies with unix machines. linux brought GNU to the masses. those of us who could not afford a unix workstation. i remember reading about unix in 1988, and i have been searching for ways to get access to unix tools ever since. i believe the book "dos to unix" from o'reilly was the first computer book i ever bought. it wasn't until linux made the rounds that my dream finally came true. with linux came the distributions, and the missed opportunity was that at that point richard should have released a GNU distribution using the linux kernel. just as we all know slackware, debian, redhat, etc, GNU should have been one of the first linux distributions. consider this: why would you use a distribution from some guy that combines linux and GNU when you can get the official GNU distribution with the linux kernel from the creator of GNU himself? GNU would have been a well known name just like the others and people would remember and respect it as one of the first distributions, if not in fact as the very first one, even older than the linux kernel itself. it would have made every other distribution look like a copy and it would have cemented the position of GNU in everyones mind. like today people ask: should i use ubuntu or fedora, then they would have asked: should i use GNU or slackware? and no matter the answer, everyone would be talking about how their favourite distribution includes GNU and how the official GNU distribution is not the only way to get GNU programs. and today we would be talking about GNU distributions instead of linux distributions. so, a simple, world-changing oversight, an accident of history, that is why linux gets more recognition. greetings, eMBee. |
| shyster Jun 12, 2015 7:31 AM EDT |
You are right, and to further bolster your analysis, I would add my story of pragmatism. I carry a 32g USB3 thumb-drive upon which I have installed Linux Mint 17.1 Mate. It is complete with my .thunderbird directory and Pale Moon with my bookmarks. This week I was in another city at a motel which furnishes 2 computers (both Win 7), a printer, and a scanner in the complementary office area for guests. I got up early and got there before 6AM, stuck my thumb-drive in a USB slot, rebooted one machine into my thumb-drive, and got my email which I saved to my inbox in Thunderbird. No time to surf, print or scan, but it was nice to have my own computer back, and I have gscan2pdf installed which would have seen the HP scanner/printer and let me function as well there as my home office. That is why Linux users value practicality and is a perfect illustration of the concept. I also have my database/word processor installed with all my probate forms and could have set up a complete working office (I'm a probate lawyer) with which to serve remote clients. When I finished, I just rebooted without the thumb-drive and they were back to normal:) |
| AwesomeTux Jun 13, 2015 2:33 AM EDT |
I largely agree with mbaehrlxer. But, shyster, I don't see how your story bolsters mbaehrlxer's analysis in anyway. How does having a bunch of free/open source software on a USB drive show anything about GNU's fall from prominence or even pragmatism? What you talk about doing is possible with BSD, OS X, and even Windows, as booting from a USB drive is a feature of the BIOS, not the operating system. It often requires certain filesystem features, the libraries for which are developed by neither Linus nor the GNU Project. And the situation you spoke of didn't seem to require any kind of non-free binary firmware normally rejected by the Free Software Foundation either. So, I don't understand what point you're trying to make. |
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