Re: [Savannah-hackers] Re: Help wanted (sysadmin work)

[Yaroslav Klyukin]

Richard Stallman wrote:

>     This way everything is easy:
>     - Count all software packages on CD.
>
> It would be necessary to add up their sizes, not just count the number
> of packages.  It would be a substantial job.  And you'd have to decide
> which packages are important enough to be worth counting.  Consider Debian;
> it has over 10,000 packages, I believe, but many are only rarely used.

Yeah - I cannot think of any way to determine importance of a package, 
therefore I think it's useless to count packages.
I just brought it as an example of a simple way to find out the 
privailing amount of the software, which does not mean that it matters much.

> In 1995, the last time someone did this that I know of,
> 28% of the system was GNU software.  Linux was 3%.  GNU software
> was not 50% of the system, but it was much bigger than Linux.
> That, I think, is enough reason to argue that calling the system
> "Linux" can't be right.

As I mentioned in my previous long e-mail, I think that calling linux - 
a linux was a decision of people, who did complete OS distributions.
But even then, people weren't calling it _just_ Linux.
They called their distributions Debian Linux, Mandrake Linux and so on, 
which is technicly right, but does not discover the whole content of the 
OS in one word. Later on, it turned out that there were several OSes, 
called "*something* linux". That's probably why the word "linux" started 
to mean "one of the distributions".
That's how I interpret it, correct me if I am wrong.
Moreover, many people omit the word "linux" when they refer to an OS, 
for example they say:
"RedHat" instead of "RedHat Linux". But RedHat is also a company, 
therefore when it's not clear, the word Linux is added, which in fact 
means OS, like "RedHat OS".
But because linux is a trade mark, nobody is going to change it, due to 
commercial importance of this word.

Therefore, as I mentioned before, the easy and effective way to make 
people call Linux a GNU/Linux is to create downloadable ISO images of 
the GNU OS. Again, there are 2 meanings of the word Linux:
1 - the linux kernel, which is the right meaning of the word.
2 - the OS, which uses the linux kernel - which is a historical way.

Pritty much the same confision as with the word "free" :)))