Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux

Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.org)
Sat, 26 Dec 1998 14:08:46 -0500


If we must name the system to
acknowledge all the contributing projects, we're going to end up with a
decidedly Entish name. :-)

You are right: we cannot possibly list, in the name of the system, all
the projects that wrote programs which turned out to be useful to
include in the operating system. There are too many of them. So it
wouldn't be valid for any one project to say, "Mention us in the
system's name, because we wrote some of these programs".

The operating system should be named from the project that started
developing it, the project that went beyond writing individual free
programs. The GNU Project did this. We set the goal of *a free
operating system*, dedicated years of strenuous effort to that goal,
and in the process developed more of the system than any other
project. We gave the system the name "GNU" (which is why the project
is the GNU Project).

But I think it's proper to add six more characters, "/Linux", to give
credit to Linus Torvalds for his contribution. We cannot mention
every contributor, but we can mention one especially important
contributor. The GNU Project started development of the system, and
in a sense Linus finished it.

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