I’ve tried using my incredible (british) brain using Google to see if these open source titans ever engaged in a battle of “friendly conversation” with one another.
I was always interested what Stallman thought of the angry but smart finnish man who gave us the robust penguin kernel that breathes life into older machines and powers supercomputers for the weather.
The same with Torvalds thoughts on Stallmans GNU involvement and him as a person.
This is because you sometimes had different organisations in the FOSS and OSS community that take on different meanings so I wanted a better idea if these chaps ever spoke in an interview together.
TLDR : Does finnish man like bearded GNU jesus man and the same vice versa
I actually believe that “GNU / Linux” creates the confusion, even the Android problem you cite.
If we all just said “Linux” to mean Linux distribution and the software ecosystem that implies, almost everybody would agree what that meant. All this “actually what you are calling Linux is actually” and “Linux is just the kernel” stuff confuses people. If Linux is just the kernel then Android and Ubuntu are equally Linux. Most people do not even know what a kernel is until you start “educating” people that “Linux” is not Linux.
An Operating System is defined by the applications that it runs natively. Alpine Linux and Ubuntu run the same software and services. Chimera Linux runs all the same stuff even though it comes without any GNU software by default ( BSD utils, Clang compiler, MUSL ). They are all “Linux”. None of them are Android or ChromeOS. They are not the embedded OS in my thermostat or body worn camera. Of course, all these things use the Linux kernel but they are not all “Linux” operating systems.
There are many examples of the kernel not defining the Operating System. iOS and macOS are not the same thing. Windows and Xbox are not the same thing. Yes, us geeks know the common infrastructure they share.
And if an operating system is defined by its applications, is “GNU” a good label? My distro of choice offers 80,000 packages of which maybe 200 are managed by the GNU Project. Go to gnu.org and look at the list of packages that are actually GNU for real. It may shock you how short the list is.
There are other single sources that contribute more software. In terms of code and base architecture, Red Hat is probably the largest contributor ( and no, I do not use Red Hat — RHEL has fewer than 3000 packages for one thing ). I do not want to call my distribution “Red Hat” Linux but frankly it makes more sense than GNU.
Some of the GNU / Linux folks say that the reason for the label is the C library ( Glibc ). But not all Linux distros use Glibc. For a mainstream Linux user, does it make sense to say that Alpine, Void, and Chimera are not the same kind of OS as Ubuntu or Fedora? A regular user could sit down at any of them and not only use them mostly the same but perhaps not even notice the difference. I could write a Linux app without knowing about Alpine and the it could be built for it easily. They all use the same apps and desktop environments. They all run Docker natively. Even fairly deep Linux knowledge applies equally to them all. As pointed out, freedesktop.org applies to them equally. They have the same driver and hardware support ( including the full graphics and audio stacks ). Most people would agree that all these “Linux” systems are pretty alike and quite different from macOS, Windows, and Android. They are all much more like each other than they are even to FreeBSD.
The GNU name pays homage to the historical contribution of the GNU Project that, while important, is pretty historical at this point. If the goal is to promote Free Software or even the GPL, the right branding would be the FSF. So, even that is confusing.
Clearly, in my view, GNU is a terrible brand to try to glob on to Linux. It is not explanatory. It is not even accurate. It is mostly political and frankly overstates the current contribution of the project. I talked code above. There is more code in Wayland or X11 and Mesa than in all of GNU probably. There are more lines of code licensed MIT than GPL in most distros. Most GPL software available is NOT provided by the GNU project.
Again, GNU is a hugely important project to free software and the history of Linux. That history should be celebrated and acknowledged. Distorting it and contorting it is not the way to do that. Enough with “GNU / Linux” already.
It is and they are. These are demonstrable facts.
I have no problem with referring to the family of Linux based operating systems collectively as Linux (with GNU/Linux being a subfamily of such), however, I firmly believe that the mythical concept of “real Linux” where some Linuxes aren’t really Linux is what creates the confusion. I would rather use other terms, like POSIX, Unix(like), and FreeDesktop to refer to so-called “real Linux” (with the caveat that they also include BSDs and the like - but I include these as part of the free desktop operating system spectrum, as most so-called Linux apps also run here. I don’t place special importance on the kernel because it is technically the furthest thing away from the user experience).
(Android being Linux isn’t a mere technicality - it means you can get a full terminal environment with a package manager and “Linux apps” and even run a full desktop environment if you really want)