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

[Richard Stallman]

    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 usually did, and usually do, call the system _just_ Linux.
That is what's wrong.

To identify and distinguish various distributions, people add other
names.  That is fine, but these are distributions of the GNU system
(plus Linux), and it's not right to call them "Linux distributions".

    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".

It happened in the opposite order: first poeple made the mistake of
calling the system "Linux", and later some started giving specific
names to distributions of the system.  They recognize that those
distributions are versions of a widely known operating system,
which they call "Linux", but it is really GNU/Linux.