Re: Question for Bastian Nocera

[guido iodice <guido iodice gmail com>]

2010/6/14 Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>:
>  It's reasonably implied that Linux includes the GNU system.
>  There is no other system that Linux has other than GNU

Pardon, but this is not true. I.e. Android has Linux but it has not
GNU. It is very different from a GNU/linux distro.


> GNU is not the main
> part of a modern GNU/Linux system. Today, apart of GNOME, GNU is
> mostly glibc, libiconv et al. (I'm not counting compilers as they are
> only relevant to devs.)


Excuse me,  I was unclear. That is no matter of quantity, but matter
of importance. In Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. have different
packages. But each one uses Linux as the kernel, and GNU. Linux and
GNU are the "core", the base of every distro. The combination of
GNU+Linux makes these Operating Systems very similar (and even binary
compatible).

Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc are "flavors" of the same OS. This OS is
composed by many packages but if you want an OS *of this kind* you
_need_ at least GNU and Linux. Without one of them you have not an OS.
If you use somethig else, you have a different OS, like Android.

If you call the whole system only "Linux" you have a paradox, because
(i.e.) Android has Linux but is not "Linux".

http://static.arstechnica.com/android-dev/android_not_linux.png