Re: [LUG] What IS an operating system ?

[Richard Brown <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

I think I might have had a ..... well it hurt my brain anyway. This has 
seemed a bit of a fruitless thread until these points were made. If I 
understand it correctly. Neil seems to be saying that GNU is the system 
upon which OS's are and can be built. If I have understood this 
correctly BSD upon which resides Mac OS X relies on GNU and therefore 
OS X is GNU based. I suppose Windows could rebuild there whole system 
basing it on GNU?!?

Could anybody clarify this for me? It seems that what we are talking 
about is a radical shift in how computers are run, should the 
revolution truly happen. Basically it seems that if all OSs use GNU, 
there would be no lockdowns in terms of use of software. I could buy in 
OS X and recompile to run on Linux. Or is that a simplification?

Thanks

Rich

On 20 Jan 2005, at 23:34, Neil Williams wrote:

> This is why it is so frustrating to find people getting the wrong side 
> of the
> story and thinking that I'm being petty or generating confusion. The 
> vast
> majority of your system is GNU, NOT Linux.
>
> On the majority of systems, if I came along and took Linux out of your 
> machine
> and slapped in some future version of Hurd or some other GNU-compatible
> kernel, you would not even know. A single reboot and Linux would be 
> replaced.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I like the Linux kernel and there is no direct 
> equivalent
> as yet - but the kernel, in many ways, is just another application 
> that uses
> GNU, the *system* is GNU.


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