gnu-misc-discuss
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Why "GNU/Linux" is not accepted: an observation


From: Kaz Kylheku (gnu-misc-discuss)
Subject: Re: Why "GNU/Linux" is not accepted: an observation
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2019 13:04:44 -0800
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/0.9.2

On 2019-11-09 11:10, Alexandre François Garreau wrote:
Actually a lot of “high-level” user-end utilities are indeed not GNU… now even more so as Gnome is not anymore (and doesn’t want to be associated to) GNU.

An unfortunate thing is that GNU project lacks indeed any full-featured
server. There are some minimal servers in inetutils and mailutils, there are stuff like MyServer… But not much really that good or known in the end.

Furthermore, most of really high-level GNU software are something quite
essential but “hidden” in computing: languages implementation (essentially lisp, but also ed, sed, awk, bison, make, smalltalk, gs, prolog, mhtml, forth, gnash, eiffel, etc.), and package managers (stow, swbis, source-install, gsrc, guix, etc.) which most non-developer users won’t know about (and developers
won’t necessarily think about it’s GNU).

The GNU project can't do everything. It would be unfortunate if
everything came from GNU; it would mean that nobody wants to do free
software outside of GNU.

Then, it's not reasonable to expect every project to join GNU.

Some use more permissive licenses.

Not every author wants to assign their copyright to some organization,
however benevolent. They may do so as contributors to an existing work,
but not for their own from-scratch major project.

Not every author wants to join their project to some organization
which sets its own rules in how projects are run; they wrote the code
and want to be "boss".

In a typical freeware distro, we find plenty of pieces that are solo work,
not part of any project. This is fine.





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]