Re: Nvidia and its choice to read the GPL "differently"

Jon Portnoy
2003-01-08T20:44:42Z

[cc list trimmed, it was getting a little excessive]

On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:

>
>
> Richard Stallman wrote:
> > Great. So not only is there no legal need to cite GNU in the Linux
> > name, there is no ethical obligation either.
> >
> > When you take part of my statement, stretch it, interpret it based on
> > assumptions you know I disagree with, and present the result as
> > something I said, that doesn't prove anything. It is childish.
> >
> > There is no ethical obligation to mention secondary contributions
> > incorporated in a large project. There ethical obligation is to cite
> > the main developer. In the GNU/Linux system, the GNU Project is the
> > principal contributor; the system is more GNU than anything else,
> > and we started it.
>
> GNU is not so important in new system. I take gcc and glibc as to be
> outside the GNU project. (they have now the GNU mark only for GNU
> convenience, IMHO) I use "GNU/Linux" only to make more explicit the
> "copyleft" ideas, but surelly not because of the GNU tools.
>
> If you insist with such arguments, you risk that someone will rewrite
> the basic GNU tools outside the GNU project (emacs is not an OS main tool,
> gcc and glibc are de facto outside GNU) (bash will remain GNU ?)
>
> ciao
> giacomo
>
>
> RMS: maybe you can reply me privatly about some more explication of your mail,
> so less OT mail, and privately maybe I can understand more about GNU/Linux flames.
>

Nearly all of your base system except the kernel is GNU. Primarily,
fileutils, sh-utils, and findutils come to mind. These could be replaced,
in which case it would no longer be GNU/Linux. As long as your standard
base system tools (chown, cp, dir, dd, df, du, ls, ln, mkdir, mv, rm,
rmdir, touch, chmod, id, kill, whoami, chroot, who, date, echo,
pwd, uname, and many others) are GNU, it's really GNU/Linux.