[OT] Re: [ILUG] ICT Expo 2006 update (ideas on helping the community)

[Noirin Plunkett]

On 3/13/06, kevin lyda <kevin at ie.suberic.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 01:30:43PM +0000, Noirin Plunkett wrote:
> > GNU != Linux
> >
> > This is old ground.
>
> oh for goodness sake.
>
> even if you exclude gnu, the history of what most people consider to be
> linux goes back to 1984.  Nearly every Linux user uses X.

I don't.

> But the fact is that when people talk about "Linux" they really mean the
> whole system.  When most people use Linux they use Firefox, Evolution
> and OpenOffice.  And underneath it they're using linux, bash, gnome, X,
> etc, etc, etc.  Many of those things are part of the GNU project.

I'm not currently using any of those things, on the linux box I have
access to. The only one of them I use with any regularity is bash,
which is certainly a GNU project, but not confined to Linux. I used
bash on Windows when I worked for Microsoft, and I don't think anyone
would have called it a GNU/Windows box.

> And quite a few of us used the GNU tool suite for years before we used
> Linux (in fact, for some of us Linux wasn't even the first free unix we
> used that tool suite on).

Hell, some of you were even around pre-GNU... That's *old* =)

> Very few questions on the mailing list are Linux kernel questions.  But
> there are loads of bash, firefox, apache, samba, awk, perl and other
> questions.  They aren't off-topic.

Sure - but Apache at least (the only one of those things I know well
enough to pronounce on) isn't a GNU project, and it's not GPL
licensed. So I don't see how using Apache makes my Linux box a
GNU/Linux box.

Noirin