
Linux Steve Cheney:






Thread beginning with comment 570056
To view parent comment, click here.
RE[2]: don't over generalize
by ssokolow on Mon 19th Aug 2013 19:14 UTC in reply to "RE: don't over generalize"
Member since:

Suddenly all the work RMS did to properly prefix system with "GNU" makes sense. GNU/Linux is as much Linux as Android/Linux. We need to clearly state _which_ Linux we are talking about.

Except that Stallman is just sore about how, with all the effort he put into GNU, Linux got all the glory. GNU is a relatively small portion of the codebase these days and GCC is most of that. By his logic, it should always be called (at minimum) "X11/GNU/Linux", spoken as "X11 on GNU on Linux".

Obviously, not something that's ever going to happen when the average human looks for two- or three-syllable names. (Win-dows, Lin-ux, Mac-OS, O-S-X, An-droid, U-bun-tu, etc.)

(It's one reason I'm glad things like LLVM are slowly squeezing the remaining "fewer LOCs than X11" of GNU out of Linux distros. It'll end this pointless nomenclature argument.)

Hence why people use "Android" to refer to the Java-centric, bootloader-locked platform with the "incomplete but liberally licensed" libc and "Linux" to refer to the ABI of the X11+glibc+Linux stack which usually also comes with the rest of the GNU userland.

As long as your glibc replacement is good enough to meet the needs of the applications you're running on it, the use or non-use of a GNU userland has little to no effect on the "Linux" ABI.

The ABI we care about is more correctly named "X11/Linux" if we're going by Stallman's "GNU on Linux" pronunciation. In fact, if you look at build identifier strings (or similar things like browser User-Agent strings), that's how it's identified.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20130731 Firefox/24.0

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[3]: don't over generalize
by Vanders on Tue 20th Aug 2013 09:15 in reply to "RE[2]: don't over generalize"
Vanders Member since:


What name should we use for people running "Android" on an unlocked 'phone?

Reply Parent Score: 4