Re: A matter of manners

[Daniel Martin]

On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 12:18 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> > with the consequence that no 
> > other car manufacturer can name their car a Focus. So if you refer to the 
> > car as a Focus, it is implicated in the inforamtion that it is a Ford. 
> 
> This is an interesting point.  There is AFAIK indeed no other operating system
> which uses the Linux kernel, so people who say they use Linux are almost
> certainly using a (modified) GNU operating system.

Well Linux is used in embedded systems without GNU quite a lot isn't it?
Also in the future a very strange person may choose to port a BSD to run
on top of Linux and create BSD/Linux. (I assume this is not done because
either the BSD guys disapprove of the GPL or they consider Linux
inferior to their own kernel.) This alone I feel is a good reason not to
use the word `Linux' to mean anything other than Linus and co's kernel.

> > In the same way there are just two operating systems available from Debian, 
> > and now I am using the full formalism, Debian GNU/Linux and Debian 
> > GNU/HURD. Debian GNU/Linux has versions as an added specification, but I am 
> > unaware of any version numbring for Debian GNU/Hurd.
> 
> The architecture is hurd-i386.  Currently there are no other plarforms for
> Hurd supported by Debian.  The linux-based versions don't have the kernel name
> in front (it's not "linux-amd64", but just "amd64") for historical reasons.
> Currently they're moving the kernel-* packages to linux-*, but AFAIK there are
> no plans yet to move the version names of the OS.

I just wanted to add that as far as I know there are 3 operating systems
available from Debian rather than 2. You've missed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
(I suppose there's GNU/kNetBSD but that's dead AFAIK.)

Actually one could argue that there is only one operating system
available from Debian. - GNU. And that Debian provides it's users with a
choice of kernel. Although it's slightly more complicated than that.

Regards,


Daniel.