IP: Re: Correction GNU/Linux

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

This is as bad as who were the Fathers of the Internet Funny failures 
have no such problems :-) djf

> Date: Sun, 05 Sep 1999 07:58:58 -0700
> From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim () oreilly com>
> Organization: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> X-Accept-Language: en
> To: farber () cis upenn edu, love () essential org
> Subject: Re: IP: Correction GNU/Linux
>
> Dave--
>
> You forwarded Richard Stallman's mail about calling Linux GNU/Linux, and
> asserting that the Free Software Foundation is "the principal developer
> of the system."  I don't want to stir up arguments with Richard, but I
> thought I should set the record straight.
>
> Linux is the work of thousands of developers, and for anyone to claim to
> be "the principal developer" is out of line, even someone like Richard,
> who has made enormous contributions.
>
> A statistical analysis of the code contributions in a typical Linux
> distribution shows that the FSF has authored less than 10% of the code.
> The collective contributions of the university community (Berkeley UNIX,
> MIT's X Window System, etc.) are somewhat larger, and there are even
> significant percentages contributed by commercial vendors.  But the
> point that Eric Raymond makes in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
> (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings) is that Linus's greatest
> contribution to Linux was not the kernel (less than 2% of the code in a
> typical distribution, albeit a very important 2%) but the promiscuous
> development methodology (the bazaar of contributing developers, rather
> than the FSF's cathedral), which allowed him to solve serious problems
> in the integration of components from a large community of networked
> developers.  Anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of Linux
> development should read Eric's essays at the URL above.  (Disclaimer:
> I'm also publishing them in book form later this year.)
>
> That being said, Richard's contribution was incredibly important.  He
> was the first one to articulate the vision that we could assemble a
> complete operating system out of the individual components that were
> written by independent developers.  Everyone who uses Linux owes him a
> debt of gratitude.  But trying to change the name to give credit to the
> GNU project is generally seen as divisive by the Linux community, and is
> not widely accepted outside the Debian distribution.
>
> The "rebranding" efforts that the community has made, in changing the
> meme from "free software" to "open source", has helped the acceptance of
> Linux by corporate America, and much as we admire and respect Richard's
> visionary contributions, few of us want to go back to the days when
> using open source software was seen as a political statement rather just
> a better technical choice.
>
> I'll leave it to Eric Raymond to argue *why* it's a better technical
> choice, which has little to do with the present relative state of Linux
> and NT, and much more to do with the sociology of successful large scale
> software development in the Internet age.
>
> --
> Tim O'Reilly @ O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
> 101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
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