Ah, that’s a one way to think of it. I prefer to think of it as “Linux + Something”, where there are many combinations of “Something” and many 10s of thousands of “Somethings”.

“In cases where it isn’t [GNU], it should be so differentiated by name.” (in a previous post)

OK. I remember the days when we had to say BSD/UNIX (or BSD/UN*X) because there were lots of other flavors.

So what is the /Linux convention? There must be some rules when something must be named in and when it should not. Is it percent of code? Is it who owns copyright on the library and some userspace tools? What are the other values of ?

I don’t think that’s fair because there aren’t any other entities owning vast swaths of UNIX utilities. That makes any alternate namings very, very akward. If there aren’t any other , then it smacks of a blatant GNU self-promoting marketing campaign. That’s not a bad thing, but I’m not enough of a GNU zealot to partake.

As latest Anonymous said, there’s a good number of applications where Linux runs without GNU. Besides embedded systems and rescue applications (which are a massive number of devices), there’re a few examples of non-GNU distros (Perlix, Perl/Linux, Glendix) and quite a lot that are “very-little-GNU” (Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core Linux, etc).

Usually, when we reach this point of the conversation, some people argue that “if you compile Linux with GCC, you’re running GNU/Linux, which is completely non-sense.

There’s a big problem in some Wikipedias about this (Spanish being a notable example), where a few individuals decided that GNU/Linux was the correct name. What happened then? There’re hundreds of places where the term GNU/Linux is used for referring to Linux operating system (with userland different than GNU’s), and the Linux kernel. In this crazy crusade, they even changed (accidentally, I guess) names of corporations and foundation (like Linux International to GNU/Linux International, which doesn’t exists) or changed names of publcations.

I think that’s a quite worse scenario than using Linux as a generic term after some kind of consensus. When people want to force their idea no-matter-what, then truth is no relevant anymore. And, sadly, that’s quite common in the GNU/Linux naming debate.

There’s the rub. I’ll wager that more people boot Linux (the kernel) without GNU than with it. Phones, Routers, Sony TVs, POS terminals, etc.

Until the general public is educated about Kernels vs OSes (unlikely at best), then Linux will continue to mean both.

We can’t control all meanings of a word. Sometimes you just have to accept multiple meanings forced on you by the general public. (c.f. “Hacker”)

So, who boots Linux without anything else? Hands in the air, people!

Yes, if you boot into busybox, it should be called Busybox + Linux. If you boot into the GNU operating system, as most people do, it should be called GNU + Linux. The differences between a kernel and the rest of the OS are blurry when you start looking hard, but just as “beach” is “sand + ocean”, “operating system” is “GNU + Linux” in most cases involving Linux. In cases where it isn’t, it should be so differentiated by name.