"Alfred M. Szmidt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > In 1985, the FSF started to ship tapes and began to receive > donations. The GNU OS (to be known later as HURD) was > progressing and most and more gaps were filled in its > architecture. > > The GNU operating system was never known as the Hurd. The Hurd was > a specific part of the GNU system, much like Emacs, GCC, etc. The > GNU operating system has always been simply known as GNU. > > History revisonism seems to be quite fun, even for articles from 1997.
Talk about revisionism. If you look through old documents, you'll find that "GNU" is used as a project name consistently. It is not called an "operating system" until much later, and even then it used in contents like "The Hurd was to be the kernel of the GNU operating system", where "GNU operating system" meant a working, not an imaginary system, assembled in total by the GNU project. At the time frame in question, "operating system" and "kernel" was used pretty much synonymously in computer science circles. This changed once Microkernels gained mindshare: when things like the file system were supposed to be run in user space, it did not make sense to call just the kernel "operating system". And the original GNU/Hurd design certainly would have been among those architectures where the kernel alone would not have earned the title operating system. Nevertheless, calling all of the individual utilities that at one point in the future _could_ be used for assembling "The GNU system" is a bit of a stretch. It makes more sense to call things "A GNU system" when they exhibit a GNU personality, namely use all those GNU programs that would also be used in "GNU proper". The whole "The GNU operating system" was a bit of a stretch outside of the GNU/Hurd realm, but the historical context was that GNU was not getting _any_ recognition out of the work it put into keeping the GNU systems with a Linux kernel running and maintained, and that the programmer/users were making it hard for the actual authors of the software to maintain it in a manner where all users would profit from improvements. It remains a contentious item, but several goals have been achieved: people nowadays tend to be more aware that it is GNU that comprises significant personality and programming effort under the hood of "Linux systems", the willingness to cooperate has improved, and the goals of free software development have become known to more people. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
