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

Richard Stallman
2003-01-09T23:07:17Z

It is you and the FSF organization which are behind this GNU stuff and
since I've been around since before you started, I'm well aware of
how much work you did and how much was work that was simply assigned
over to the FSF.

Some GNU programs are FSF-copyrighted; when people contribute to them,
we ask them to assign their copyrights to the FSF. Other GNU programs
are not FSF-copyrighted; their developers retain the copyright. For
those programs, the developers decide how to deal with the copyright
on contributions.

So if you count up the code that is FSF-copyrighted, that is just a
portion of the GNU software.

If we remove all the work that you did not do, then
it's vividly clear that Linux is a larger effort.

If you assume that the whole system is Linux, and count every part
that isn't GNU software as part of the "Linux effort", then the part
you count as "Linux" will be much bigger than the GNU software, and
this will "prove" the assumption you started with--that the whole
system is Linux.

In the past 8 years I've seen plenty of arguments that the system is
justly called "Linux". Some are based on inaccurate facts; those are
sometimes clear and rational, just mistaken. But most of them involve
a well-understood logical fallacy, artfully disguised so that it takes
a some thought to find it. With practice, people can become expert at
spotting the fallacies.