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Linux and the GNU System
by Richard Stallman
For more information see also the GNU/Linux FAQ, and Why GNU/Linux?
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day,
without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of
GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its
users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by
the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just
a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the
system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs
that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system,
but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a
complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with
the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux
added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really
distributions of GNU/Linux.
Many users do not understand the difference between the kernel, which
is Linux, and the whole system, which they also call "Linux". The
ambiguous use of the name doesn't help people understand. These users
often think that Linus Torvalds developed the whole operating system in
1991, with a bit of help.
Programmers generally know that Linux is a kernel. But since they have
generally heard the whole system called "Linux" as well, they often
envisage a history that would justify naming the whole system after the
kernel. For example, many believe that once Linus Torvalds finished
writing Linux, the kernel, its users looked around for other free
software to go with it, and found that (for no particular reason) most
everything necessary to make a Unix-like system was already available.
What they found was no accident--it was the not-quite-complete GNU
system. The available free software added up to a complete system
because the GNU Project had been working since 1984 to make one. In the
GNU Manifesto we set forth the goal of developing a free Unix-like
system, called GNU. The Initial Announcement of the GNU Project also
outlines some of the original plans for the GNU system. By the time
Linux was started, GNU was almost finished.
Most free software projects have the goal of developing a particular
program for a particular job. For example, Linus Torvalds set out to
write a Unix-like kernel (Linux); Donald Knuth set out to write a text
formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window system (the
X Window System). It's natural to measure the contribution of this kind
of project by specific programs that came from the project.
If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way, what
would we conclude? One CD-ROM vendor found that in their "Linux
distribution", GNU software was the largest single contingent, around
28% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential
major components without which there could be no system. Linux itself
was about 3%. (The proportions in 2008 are similar: in the "main"
repository of gNewSense, Linux is 1.5% and GNU packages are 15%.) So if
you were going to pick a name for the system based on who wrote the
programs in the system, the most appropriate single choice would be
"GNU".
But that is not the deepest way to consider the question. The GNU
Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software
packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did
that. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we
developed one. The GNU Project set out to develop a complete free
Unix-like system: GNU.
Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the
system, and they all deserve credit for their software. But the reason
it is an integrated system--and not just a collection of useful
programs--is because the GNU Project set out to make it one. We made a
list of the programs needed to make a complete free system, and we
systematically found, wrote, or found people to write everything on the
list. We wrote essential but unexciting (1) components because you
can't have a system without them. Some of our system components, the
programming tools, became popular on their own among programmers, but
we wrote many components that are not tools (2). We even developed a
chess game, GNU Chess, because a complete system needs games too.
By the early 90s we had put together the whole system aside from the
kernel. We had also started a kernel, the GNU Hurd, which runs on top
of Mach. Developing this kernel has been a lot harder than we expected;
the GNU Hurd started working reliably in 2001, but it is a long way
from being ready for people to use in general.
Fortunately, we didn't have to wait for the Hurd, because of Linux.
Once Torvalds freed Linux in 1992, it fit into the last major gap in
the GNU system. People could then combine Linux with the GNU system to
make a complete free system -- a version of the GNU system which also
contained Linux. The GNU/Linux system, in other words.
Making them work well together was not a trivial job. Some GNU
components(3) needed substantial change to work with Linux. Integrating
a complete system as a distribution that would work "out of the box"
was a big job, too. It required addressing the issue of how to install
and boot the system--a problem we had not tackled, because we hadn't
yet reached that point. Thus, the people who developed the various
system distributions did a lot of essential work. But it was work that,
in the nature of things, was surely going to be done by someone.
The GNU Project supports GNU/Linux systems as well as the GNU system.
The FSF funded the rewriting of the Linux-related extensions to the GNU
C library, so that now they are well integrated, and the newest
GNU/Linux systems use the current library release with no changes. The
FSF also funded an early stage of the development of Debian GNU/Linux.
Today there are many different variants of the GNU/Linux system (often
called "distros"). Most of them include nonfree programs--their
developers follow the "open source" philosophy associated with Linux
rather than the "free software" philosophy of GNU. But there are also
completely free GNU/Linux distros. The FSF supports computer facilities
for a few of them.
Making a free GNU/Linux distribution is not just a matter of
eliminating various nonfree programs. Nowadays, the usual version of
Linux contains nonfree programs too. These programs are intended to be
loaded into I/O devices when the system starts, and they are included,
as long series of numbers, in the "source code" of Linux. Thus,
maintaining free GNU/Linux distributions now entails maintaining a free
version of Linux too.
Whether you use GNU/Linux or not, please don't confuse the public by
using the name "Linux" ambiguously. Linux is the kernel, one of the
essential major components of the system. The system as a whole is
basically the GNU system, with Linux added. When you're talking about
this combination, please call it "GNU/Linux".
If you want to make a link on "GNU/Linux" for further reference, this
page and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html are good choices.
If you mention Linux, the kernel, and want to add a link for further
reference, http://foldoc.org/linux is a good URL to use.
Postscripts
Aside from GNU, one other project has independently produced a free
Unix-like operating system. This system is known as BSD, and it was
developed at UC Berkeley. It was nonfree in the 80s, but became free in
the early 90s. A free operating system that exists today(4) is almost
certainly either a variant of the GNU system, or a kind of BSD system.
People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like
GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free
software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from
GNU activists helped persuade them, but the code had little overlap
with GNU. BSD systems today use some GNU programs, just as the GNU
system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as
wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately. The BSD
developers did not write a kernel and add it to the GNU system, and a
name like GNU/BSD would not fit the situation.(5)
Notes:
1. These unexciting but essential components include the GNU assembler
(GAS) and the linker (GLD), both are now part of the GNU Binutils
package, GNU tar, and many more.
2. For instance, The Bourne Again SHell (BASH), the PostScript
interpreter Ghostscript, and the GNU C library are not programming
tools. Neither are GNUCash, GNOME, and GNU Chess.
3. For instance, the GNU C library.
4. Since that was written, a nearly-all-free Windows-like system has
been developed, but technically it is not at all like GNU or Unix,
so it doesn't really affect this issue. Most of the kernel of
Solaris has been made free, but if you wanted to make a free system
out of that, aside from replacing the missing parts of the kernel,
you would also need to put it into GNU or BSD.
5. On the other hand, in the years since this article was written, the
GNU C Library has been ported to several versions of the BSD
kernel, which made it straightforward to combine the GNU system
with that kernel. Just as with GNU/Linux, these are indeed variants
of GNU, and are therefore called, for instance, GNU/kFreeBSD and
GNU/kNetBSD depending on the kernel of the system. Ordinary users
on typical desktops can hardly distinguish between GNU/Linux and
GNU/*BSD.
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