On 2022-01-20 18:40:13, Antony Stone wrote:
> On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
> >
> > Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought that
> > Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the UNIX group - I
> > wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and "The Unix Programming
> > Environment" would have happened without his obvious ability to take
> > abstruse and difficult material and make it accessible.
> >
> > If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he didn't
> > mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus' original
> > email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that linux wouldn't have
> > happened.
>
> I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".
>
> Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I believe) because
> he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of his own, and therefore he
> was of course going to build it using as much free (of charge) software as he
> could.
>
> That meant GNU.
>
> I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful, and formed
> the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of those principles are
> embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU (for example, devices as files,
> and pipes, in the first; and tools such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so
> these days we can't really separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU
> (although the reverse is not true).

It's entirely possible to have a Linux OS without any GNU software.
Using such things as busybox and toybox for example.

--
A big old stinking pile of genius that no one wants
coz there are too many silver coated monkeys in the world.