[linux-audio-user] Linux and Standards

[Jack O'Quin]

Jan Depner <eviltwin69 at cableone.net> writes:

> On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 15:15, lau at lupulin.net wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 02:04:36PM -0600, Jan Depner wrote:
> > > No disrespect intended to Richard Stallman and the GNU crowd.
> > > The OS wouldn't exist without those tools but the tools are not
> > > part of the OS.  They are merely applications that are bundled
> > > in with the distribution.
> > > 
> > > Given the more widely accepted definition of an operating system
> > > I think it is perfectly acceptable to speak of Linux as a
> > > standard.
> > 
> > This is a gray area, but I think that you cannot just say that the gnu 
> > tools are _not_ a part of the operating system.
> > 
> > Would you say that the startup scripts are _not_ a part of the OS ?
> > All the startup scripts that I've seen rely are parts of gnu coreutils.
> > 
> > I think that qualifies as being _part_ of the OS.
> 
> Nope.  A startup script is just a startup script.  Grub is not part
> of the operating system either.  The OS is, by definition, the
> kernel.  An interesting thing to consider is RTLinux.  Linux is
> *not* the OS in RTLinux.  The RT microkernel is the OS.  Linux is
> merely the idle process.  I guess you could say it's part of the OS
> since it is in the inner loop so to speak.  

I suppose reasonable people could disagree about the definition of
"Operating System".  I know what it means to me, and that's a heck of
a lot more than my friend Jan's minimalist definition.

In the commercial world, when you buy Solaris from Sun, AIX from IBM,
or Windows XP from M$, they call what they sell you an "operating
system".  The kernel and all its device drivers represent about 5 or
10 percent of those products.  The rest is all the shells, utilities,
install programs, startup scripts, etc. that are needed to actually
"operate the system".  Without an OS, your computer is useless bare
metal and silicon.

It is useful to make a distinction between "applications" which are
programs users actually *want* to run and "system utilities" which are
all the programs needed to install and run those applications.  The
system utilities are traditionally part of the OS.

There are some grey areas in the realm of development tools.  IBM
sells their compilers separately (not all users are programmers), but
the linker is part of the OS, because some applications run a
link-edit step when installing.  In an open source world, compilers
*are* needed for installing many applications.  So, while the IBM
compiler is not part of AIX, GCC arguably *is* part of GNU/Linux.

In traditional Unix, the basic development tools were included in the
OS.  (Anyone remember the Portable C Compiler?)  Thompson and Richie
invented the "nut metaphor" for talking about this stuff.  The
"kernel" was the seed in the middle of the nut, while the "shell" was
the outer wrapping seen by users on their teletype machines.  Even in
1969, Unix was a great deal more than the kernel.  The scope of
operating systems has grown considerably since then.

I think Richard Stallman is right to say that "Linux" is only the
kernel and that most of the GNU utilities are needed to make a
complete OS.  And, I agree that GNU/Linux is a reasonable name for
that OS.

By this definition, Debian is much more than just an OS.  It also
contains tens of thousands of applications.  So do Red Hat and the
other distributions.  This is much of the power of open source
software.

JMHO  :-)
-- 
  joq