The philosophy of Linux - long

[Ronald KA4INM Youvan <ka4inm tampabay rr com>]

> >  Do you have any document describing the "philosophy of
> > Linux"?  I searched for "philosophy of Linux" but only 

> > could find discussions about free vs. non-free and 

> > cathedral vs. bazaar.


> Hmm. Have you heard, for example, that Linux is supposed to be
> functional without X?


  In fact `the X system' is not any part of LINUX, it was written
by MIT and can be compiled to run under DOS, windows, almost any
OS, it is not an OS, it is GUI layer like windows 3.1 is, (formally
called the `X system', now `X windows') It is included to make LINUX
competitive with winders.  (I think it is in the public domain.)

  I think "the philosophy of Linux" refers to each program, such
as all of the utilities like ls or cmp or ps or df or du each doing
one task, each been debugged thoroughly, does it's task correctly
under all reasonable circumstances, has all needed command line
switches to accomplish `IT's TASK'.  Every one is a suitable to
be called by a more complex application as though they were it's
subroutines.  Using one of them offers the new author the assurance
that they won't develop some quirk under some odd circumstance that
will have to be debugged before returning to their original project.

  I also seems to apply to programs like "mc" being a `file manager',
a program that examines, compares, copies, runs and moves disk files,
locally, on an intranet, the internet (FTP) etc.  It does not operate
the scanner, make CDR's, wav or ogg files, it is not a word processor,
in fact to create a new text file I <enter> touch `filename' on the
command line and press F4 to enter a comment into it. (see man touch)

  I think "the philosophy of Linux' is really "the philosophy of
UNIX" which is from what Ken Thompson did when when he created
UNIX, with the help of Dennis M. Ritchie, while working at Bell labs.
  Dennis Ritchie added data types and new syntax to Ken Thompson's
"B" programming language to create the "C" programming language
which has become integral to UNIX.  (and LINUX)

       73 (= Best Regards) de: Ron ka4inm tampabay rr com
    100% LINUX, since July, 1997   SENT Time and Date are UTC
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