GNU/Linux

Richard Stallman has continuously disputed the use of “Linux” to describe what is commonly known as the “Linux Operating System”. Some of his reasons are sound, but there are also flaws. Stallman claims that since the Linux kernel alone does nothing by itself, and since most of the other important pieces that provide actual functionality are GNU - powerful pieces of the unfinished GNU system such as the GNU C compiler - a working system should be called the “GNU/Linux Operating System”.

One obvious flaw in this argument is that Stallman never explicitly defines what an operating system is. Although the definition of an operating system is debatable, depending on who you ask, the academic definition of an operating system is exactly the definition for a kernel. Nothing in the classic definition of an operating system is predicated on the fact that a user has any specific interaction, or that programs do in fact exist, only that the operating system can allocate resources appropriately if asked by other programs.

To be fair, when most people think of an operating system these days, they think of a system that they can actually use. And really, the “Operating System” and “OS” terms in “Windows Operating System” and “Mac OS X” respectively refer the the entire system that is installed, which includes a kernel, compiler (possibly), browsers, shells, mail programs, etc. So Stallman is not wrong, per se, he just isn’t right.

On the other hand when Linux Torvalds says “operating system”, he means it in the classical, academic sense, and therefore when he says that he wrote the Linux operating system, he is correct.

Another flaw in Stallman’s argument is that he trivializes the importance of the kernel, both in its importance to the system and in its value as an engineering achievement. To put the former into perspective, in terms of a system, without a kernel, you have nothing. With it, you at least have something. This cannot be said for any piece of GNU software, or even the entire collection of GNU software (included in Linux) taken as a whole. To put the latter into perspective, the intent of the GNU Project itself was to include its own kernel, which is currently known as the GNU Hurd. This kernel was put into development before the Linux kernel, and yet as of today - over fifteen years later - it is still not complete. This is typically attributed (by Stallman and other free software advocates) to the complex design pattern chosen for the GNU Hurd, that of a microkernel, but most others simply give credit to Linus for an excellent design and his mastery of programming.

Why does the name matter? It matters to Stallman, not (as argued by some) because he himself wants credit, but because in his view, to not associate GNU with the most widely used free operating system, which indeed utilizes many GNU contributions, is to miss the entire point of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF): freedom.

Open Source

The principles of the FSF boil down to this: freedom for the sake of freedom. Stallman believes that the freedoms provided by the GPL and free software are more important than the software itself, and therefore it is not as important to actually have and use the Linux system as it is to understand how and why it exists in the first place.

But this view has evolved away from the original purpose of the movement, that of free software. The software part is important; after all, it isn’t called the “Free Foundation”. Like the kernel in the GNU/Linux argument, without the software you have nothing. Without the freedom, well, at least you might have some software.

If the community emphasizes freedom over software, and the software produced is shitty, does it serve the community just as well? No, it can’t, because shitty software serves nobody. If someone writes “hello world” and releases it under the GPL while someone else releases a robust, open 3D graphics driver under the same license, are the contributions equal? According to Stallman’s “freedom over all else” motto, yes, they are both free and therefore equal. Is that practical?

The Open Source Initiative doesn’t think so. And the founders are right. We need software and we need freedom. Without the software the freedom is just academic.