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. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
