GNU/Linux naming debate

[Mike Bilow]

Rich Braun wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:

 RB> I should also point out that Linus had a much narrower goal
 RB> than the FSF:  to make his initial contribution, he needed
 RB> only to make his boot-loader and device interface work on
 RB> the 386 chip.

One could argue this, but my perception was the Linus wanted to make a system
that used the native capabilities of the 386-class hardware.  He had been using
Minix, which is written to the 286 which Bill Gates (in the OS/2 context)
appropriately termed "brain dead."  In retorspect, the 386 proved to be the
minimum platform on which one could build a useful multitasking operating
system, and the few attempts to use the 286 -- Minix, OS/2 1.x -- were
extremely limited even in they were remarkable technical achievements.  And, of
course, the 286 model deservedly turned out to be a dead-end.

 RB> The FSF was hamstrung primarily by the stated
 RB> goal to simultaneously release the Hurd on multiple hardware
 RB> platforms (pretty much all Unix hardware environments except
 RB> the Macintosh; and in fact one of the trickier requirements
 RB> was that it specifically *not* run on the Mac, owing to
 RB> antipathy between Apple and FSF founders).  This goal worked
 RB> well for the GNU user environment's remarkably wide global
 RB> adoption, but it got in the way of kernel development.

I think you misstate the situation.  There was certainly no requirement that
the GNU product not run on the Macintosh.  Rather, the basis of the dispute as
I understood it was that Apple refused to document the Macintosh (or anything
else) sufficiently to write system-level code, and therefore Apple hardware was
simply declared unsupported.  But there were obvious very good reasons to
support running on the Motorola 68000-family hardware, and this was probably
seen as the most Unix-friendly of all major microprocessors of the era.  There
is no question that system-level programmers saw the 68000 as nirvana compared
to the byzantine x86, and this was duly reflected in the capabilities of the
Mac OS relative to MS-DOS.  Even by the mid-1990s, it was far from clear that
the dominant architecture by 2000 would be x86, as PowerPC, 88000, and other
RISC contenders had to be taken seriously.

Linux was at first very intimately tied to the x86, but that led to Linux
becoming a really useful running system far sooner than would have been
possible using a more elegant, say microkernel, design.  One of Linus' greatest
talents has been to get things out the door in some working fashion, even if he
knew they were really hacks that would have to be cleaned up later.

Also, the fact that Linux was from the beginning built by college students who
were short of money had a significant effect that is often forgotten.  In
particular, Linux ended up being designed to run in low memory and other
difficult environments because of these economic necessities -- 16 MB RAM cost
in the neighborhood of $1000 when Linux development started, and many machines
had BIOS limitations which prevented them from supporting more than this.  So
elegant solutions which would have eaten time and money, such as platform
independence and a microkernel architecture, were avoided from the outset.
 
-- Mike


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