GNU/Linux naming debate

[mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

Rich Braun wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 RB> Poll:  who's right?  Did Linus tender Linux as a contribution 
 RB> to the GNU project, or did RMS tender the GNU environment to 
 RB> the Linux community?  ;-)

GNU tools are not generally specific to Linux, and Linux was not developed with
any clear long term goal in mind.  I was involved with Linux when it was in the
"neat toy" stage, around kernel 0.12 or so, and I can assure you that it was
not especially useful.  In fact, it was at that time considered a major
accomplishment (and I think the phrase was "indication of maturity") that the
Linux kernel could be built on a machine running Linux itself, as all early
building of Linux was actually performed on Minix.

GNU and FSF, on the other hand, were what we would today call "political" from
the very start.  The whole motivation for GNU was philosophical, not to give
the world capabilities it did not have but to give it references of commonly
used components which had evolved in vendor-specific ways.  Even then, it was
understood that fragmentation of Unix was a bad thing, and some variants were
truly awful and bizarre, such as Xenix.  As a result, the notion of "open
source" was born partly out of necessity, and GNU even antedates POSIX.

To give you some idea of how unfocused early Linux development was, I
originally became involved in the development of the Adaptec SCSI driver
because I was one of the few people interested who could afford a SCSI
controller!  (Obviously, my extensive driver-level experience with other
operating systems helped, but that's not the point.)  I certainly would not say
that one could "run" Linux at that time, although one could experiment with it
to great effect.

The GNU folks did not seem to be quite sure how to respond to Linux.  They
dislike the open development model, which looked chaotic to them.  There is no
denying that the death of most such projects is an inability to get things done
on time and out the door, and the GNU experience had taught them a number of
organizational techniques to combat that.  As a result, the GNU sense seemed to
be that Linux would eventually come unraveled, and that a closed development
model such as used by FreeBSD would have a better chance of survival.  FSF also
had its own operating system project, what we now know as "Hurd," which was
treated similarly to the Holy Grail, in that there is a lot of seeking and not
much finding.  So my perception was that the FSF view of Linux was at first
honest pessimism mixed with dismay, especially since at that time no one
expected Linux to become platform-independent and run on anything other than
the Intel architecture.  Eventually, the FSF decided to try to fight this sort
of chaos directly by joining forces with the Debian project, which was intended
to provide an organizational infrastructure to stand behind an officially
endorsed FSF distribution of Linux, very much the way Cygnus stands behind GCC
or Aladdin stands behind Ghostscript. Ironically, although Debian turned out to
be a great success on exactly these original terms, things started badly and
led to a parting of the ways with FSF.

It was the easy availability of GNU tools, especially the C compiler, which
made Linux possible.  Before Linux was even imagined, GCC was a mature product
and the most important of the GNU line.  Emacs, for example, played no
important role in the existence of Linux, but no one would have even started on
Linux if developing a C compiler was going to be the first step.

Linus himself has often joked that many of his decisions have been motivated 
by laziness.  That is a serious joke, since laziness leads to efficiency.  The
greatest single GNU contribution to Linux, of course, is the GPL.  Besides
that, however, I can't see regarding Linux as in any way a GNU project.  The
fact that Linus had no long term goal for his project is made clear by his
failure to name it, and "Linux" was coined by other people to tweak Linus much
in the same spirit with which "Unix" was coined to tweak "Multics."
 
-- Mike


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