On Saturday 05 June 2010 09:02:48 you wrote: > > projects that are directly developed and maintained by the GNU project do > > not work properly and are mostly useless - like hurd. > > > > Yes, Red Hat does maintain or contribute significantly to several GNU > projects including coreutils, Glibc, GCC etc and while I understand > your point, you seem to make a false distinction between directly and > indirectly maintained projects from GNU. GNU is a umbrella effort of > the FSF to create a completely free software environment and there is > participation from volunteers and multiple organizations, commercial > and otherwise. FSF doesn't employ anyone to directly to work on any of > the GNU projects anymore although they did in the past. >
I am in complete agreement with you. The reality is that every component of the linux os is maintained and developed by some one or the other. Some do it under their own banner, others do it under other banners. FSF has always had a drive to enroll developers under it's banner and get them to add 'GNU' to the name and license the software under the GPL and also assign the copyright to the FSF. Fair enough. Unfortunately there are some people who think that if a piece of software has the word 'GNU' in it, then it means that the GNU project has developed and is maintaining that software. This is as silly as saying that any software maintained and developed on sourceforge is maintained and developed by sourceforge. I also agree that in the early days, support of an umbrella organisation like GNU could have given some benefits of help and protection to the authors of the software. But that was 25-30 years ago. The situation is radically different now. Huge volumes of code, licensed under a plethora of licenses and hosted all over the place have been produced. All without the 'protection' of the GNU project. Also I find that apart from RMS, no developer is really bothered about the name and banner under which the software he is developing is. If one joins any project, or contributes to one, one accepts whatever name is there. Sometimes in the case of a fork or in case of disagreement, there may be a name change - but this is rare. What I am fighting against is the idea that 'without GNU toolchain there would have been no linux'. The people who developed the components of the toolchain would still have developed them - they would have named it something else. That is all. -- regards kg http://livejournal.com/lawgon _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
