Originally posted by kpedersen
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I wasn't just being lazy when I implicitly said that GNU's contributions to what you expect from a modern Linux have alternatives in a combination of musl-libc and BusyBox. You don't see someone referring to macOS as something like "GNU/macOS" just because GNU are the maintainers of the gzip implementation everyone uses.
Bear in mind that any Linux-specific userland bits aren't GNU bits. Hence my mentioning of things like e2fsprogs and procps. Likewise, pretty much the only really noteworthy thing specifically related to portability that GNU contributes, rather than being portable as a secondary facet of its function like GCC, is autoconf, which people are retiring in favour of things like CMake these days.
Beyond that, aside from copyright assignment, D-Bus, pkg-config, desktop-file-utils, xdg-user-dirs, Cairo, Mesa, Pixman, Plymouth, X.Org, fontconfig, libinput, uchardet, GStreamer, Poppler, PulseAudio, ModemManager, AppStream, Avahi, colord, Flatpak, FreeType, HarfBuzz, LDTP, libburn, PackageKit, Telepathy, udisks, and a ton of other things share about as much relation to FreeDesktop.org as a lot of GNU things do to the GNU project and the FSF. (ie. they were either created under the aegis of FDO or donated to it)
I'd say they have at least as much claim as the FSF, so maybe we should be calling it XDG/Linux. After all, glibc is only one package, while XDG provides a forest of packages and standards which define the APIs that portable software depends on, and you don't see them clamoring for it to be called "GNU/POSIX/Linux", so why should it be "XDG/glibc/Linux"?
Again, I wasn't being hyperbolic when I said that Stallman uses some very tortured logic to justify giving GNU top billing over all the other userland components. It's clear that, perfectly in line with his personality, he's refusing to concede that because they took a "make it perfect" approach to Hurd, the OS's name won't be "GNU".
In fact, there's a blog post I've been trying to re-locate for years which tallied it all up, including drawing graphs for things like "total lines of code", "total bytes", etc., to show just how much Stallman had to torture his logic to justify GNU getting that spot.
Besides, the problem isn't getting people to say "GNU/Linux" rather than "Linux", it's getting them to say "Ubuntu Linux" rather than "Ubuntu" and, as I said, when I say "Linux", I'm explicitly including distros that use no GNU componentry aside from tertiary bits like gzip, yet still "fit the silhouette". The overton window has to be moved before your efforts will be more than just counterproductive.
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