Re: GNU/Linux Naming

[mike3]

On Dec 7, 4:29 am, David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <r...@1407.org> writes:
>
>
>
> > On Fri, Dec 07, 2007 at 10:35:41AM +0100, Alexander Terekhov wrote:
>
> >> Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:
> >> [...]
> >> > No, Linux is a kernel, you can get all of it in a single tar ball at
> >> >http://www.kernel.org/ ... you know, neat packages called
> >> > linux-VERSION.tar.bz2 (for instance).
>
> >> Have you ever visited that site, mini-RMS?
>
> >>http://www.kernel.org/
>
> >> <quote>
>
> >> What is Linux?
>
> >> Linux is a clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch
> >> by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers
> >> across the Net.
>
> >> </quote>
>
> > Yes, I know the Linux developers are from a school of belief where the
> > operating system is the kernel, your point?
>
> Actually, there is no consistent school of belief involved in quotes
> like the above that take all credit and warp history: they talk about
> "the operating system Unix" (though Unix is a well-known and partly
> standardized entity including a lot of userland) and say that "Linux"
> (which is all they ever talk about) is in the same ballpark and was
> written from scratch by Linus "with assistance".
>
> It is exactly history-mongering quotes like this that forced Richard
> Stallman to come up with a plan of countering this sort of revisionism.
> And in the wake of that, some "schools of belief" were made up to clad
> this revisionism with a layer of legitimacy.  But in the above
> quotation, it is still rather bare.
>

Hmm, so does this mean that the reason why GNU deserves credit
in the _name_ and not somewhere else is because GNU's contribution
is so significant -- they pretty much built most of the rest of the
system?

And perhaps also to counter such historical revisionism?