I would expect that most of the people who speak of "the Linux
operating system" think of this as just a minor lack of precision.
But aside from being unfair (which by itself would not be worth
fussing about), it also tends to split the community and thus
discourage communication and cooperation. When the people who use
what is essentially the GNU system think of themselves as "Linux
users", and not as "GNU users", often they don't see a reason
cooperate with the people who maintain the GNU software. This leads
to version-skew and unnecessary incompatibility.
But there *are* two separate communities. The Linux community, is quite
rightly, most interested in the betterment of systems which use the
Linux kernel. If this means that we have a malloc() which assumes the
use of mmap(), and gives us significant performance improvement,
naturally the Linux community will be interested in using it.
The GNU community seems to be much more interested in software that
works on a wide variety of systems, and if there is one system that all
GNU packages are expected to default to building under, it is the Hurd.
(I go to Chinese restaurant outings with mib, so I get treated to this
sort of Hurd-centricism. Perhaps this is not a fair assessment to
others in the GNU community.)
The GNU community seems to be much more concerned with pushing a
specific social goal using the GNU GPL as the means towards that goal.
Most Linux developers seem to be much more flexible and pragmatic about
the enforcement of the GPL. We don't want people making money off our
work, so we don't make things available under a BSD/X Consortium style
license, but for the most part the GPL seems to have more moral force
than legal force. For example, the fact that we have Berkeley
copyrighted code (SLIP compression) in the Linux kernel doesn't bother
many core Linux developers overmuch. This would probably be a real
problem if the copyright ownership of the Linux kernel were vested with
the FSF.
Partially related to this is the fact that we don't insist on all of the
legal paperwork and centralization of control of the interpretation and
enforcement of the GPL into some central organization (like the FSF)
that seems to be more of the norm in the GNU community. Speaking
generally, there seems to be a much larger number of GPL hard-liners in
the GNU community than there are in the Linux community.
One way to help unify the community, and gently encourage more
cooperation, is to use the term "Linux-based GNU system" to
describe these systems more accurately.
Will it unify the community, or tear it apart? Some of the above
differences can (and have) led to religious flame wars, which I for one
am not enthusiastic to see again. Can we just agree that the two
communities have different goals, and leave it at that?
The use of the term "Linux-based GNU system" has the danger of arousing
the ire of those people who feel that all of their contributions to the
Linux community are being hijacked to further the political/social goals
of the GNU community.
The MIT Science Fiction Society has the motto "we're not fans, we just
read the stuff". Likewise, I'd argue that large parts of the Linux
community has the attitude, "we're not activists, we just want an OS
that works and that we can hack on." The GNU community seems to want to
be a community of activists. There is nothing wrong with that, but
that's not the Linux community.
I appreciate the work that the GNU community has done, and I hope that
it and the Linux community can indeed work together. However, I point
to Bosnia as an example of what can happen if you try to force together
two communities that really have different goals. One or the other of
the communities generally end up having to yield, and that can cause
resentments, and built-up resentments have led to very bloody wars.
- Ted