Is Linux "GNU"?

Last week Griff Palmer thanked me for not getting all worked up over nits in his article on Linux, but wondered if he'd hear from Richard Stallman (RMS to those not in the know) because he called it "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" (those difficult editors, again).

Well, sure enough, just as Griff predicted, RMS struck back with exactly that complaint - "For months now, my home machine has run nothing but Linux. but that cannot be true. Linux by itself would not run without the GNU operating system. He must be talking about GNU/Linux and calling it Linux, as often happens." But are we being a bit loose with history here?

Let's set the Wayback Machine to the early 1990's, when Linus was still reading Dr. Dobbs Journal articles about Porting Unix to the 386 and Minix books while putting together his own personal X86 version called "Linux", and when the GNU people were mainly known for a great compiler called GCC and a fantasy OS project called "HURD".

So, when Linus began doing very crude rude OS pre-alpha releases, did the GNU people embrace Linux as one of their own back then, hop on the bandwagon, and abandon HURD? Nope. But didn't they call it GNU/Linux then anyway, because it was a copyleft work? Nope - they only called it Linux, just like they called 386BSD Jolix. Neither 386BSD nor Linux originated as GNU projects, and neither one had the blessing of RMS, although both used GNU software in their development work and releases and both sent back fixes and code to the GNU project.

RMS had envisioned a GNU OS called HURD as being the one true open source OS. Of course, history shows they failed with HURD, and Linux succeeded, partially because RMS and the old guard weren't in charge of Linux and it grew like Topsy. I guess they figure they can rename Linux now to their liking, just because it uses a copyleft, but life doesn't work that way.

Hey, maybe Larry Lessig would like to know about this. Just think what things he could rename with the creative commons license. But Larry's a smart guy, and smart people know you can't say something is yours just because you wish it was yours. For better or worse, Linux is Linus's creation - it's called "Linux" - just as the copyleft is RMS's creation, and RMS should gracefully admit it.