Re: Question for Bastian Nocera

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 2:53 PM, guido iodice <guido iodice gmail com> wrote:

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.

Right but it's not called Linux, it's called Android which includes the Linux kernel. But Google is not insisting on Android/Linux are they?  Rightly, the whole system should have been called "GNU" from the very beginning.  That's not what happened though, FSF waited for Hurd to complete the GNU system and missed the branding window.   That's why I said you have to write a new name that includes the Linux kernel just like Android did.

Ask yourself whether you would be able to discuss software in this manner where we append who gets credit in the name.

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

You could argue it is a paradox but in marketing there are all kinds of paradoxes that makes no sense since we aren't talking about logic here when it comes to getting people's attention.  The namespace "Linux" is taken and it implies GNU.  Google created a new name space to imply something else.  They can't say it runs "Linux".  You will notice that neither Android, Intel or Apple mention the underlying kernel in their phones and nettop boxeds because to mention them would cause confusion. 

In the context of marketing if I said "Buy Linux" I'm implying Linux + GNU because the layman only understands that.  If I was talking to a kernel person and said I'm hacking some subsystem in Linux it is implied we are talking about the kernel.  The english language is full of examples where context of how a word is used changes.  In a marketing context Linux means GNU/Linux.

sri