Letter to the editor: Linux is part of system

Stallman is like one's conscience:

Completely Relentless

Profoundly irritating

Absolutely necessary

The GPL is a work of genius. No matter whether one programs for fun (Linus), utility (esr) or communitarianism (rms), most developers need the protection the GPL provides against exploiters.

Go Richard!

It is true that Richard Stallman has played an important role in the development of a completely free operating system and a bustling open source community.

It's too bad that he constantly destroys his street cred every time he blathers on endlessly about how he thinks he has naming rights for the operating system. It's called Linux. The Linux operating system. You know, the one based on the Linux kernel. It's got some GNU tools on it, and it's probably got a GNU compiler, but it's still called Linux.

Even his "lines of code" argument doesn't hold true anymore. If that were the case, we would all be running OpenOffice/Linux, not GNU/Linux.

I do agree with Richard that the base "OS" is mostly GNU running a Linux kernel even if most "distributions" are much more than even that code wise (Xorg, OpenOffice.org, KDE, etc). I have many servers that do not even have X installed which means I also have none of the other graphical stuff installed (OpenOffice.org, KDE, etc). I still have to have most of the GNU stuff to be useful though.

Then on the other hand I still call my OS "Linux" generically as it is somewhat awkward to put the GuhNewSlash part in front of it. I have absolutely no problem with Richard ranting about whatever he wants to rant about because if it were not for Richard we would not have the most important part of the software I love, the GNU GPL. It's this little gem that allows me to be able to do things like this:

http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net:81/