X and GNU software, was Re: GNU and the BSD kernel

I think it's a sample implementation, not a reference implementation. It certainly used to be. (This is an important difference. With a reference implementation, the implementation _is_ the spec, by definition. With a sample implementation, the spec is something else.) This brought its own forms of madness, like X servers that do their own bus enumeration, even in cases like NetBSD/sparc where there is absolutely no excuse for it...meaning, eg, that they have to run as root even when the user starting them owns the framebuffer, keyboard, and mouse devices. There's a reason I use the X11R6.4 sample server on machines where I'm not saddled with peecee-style video-card hell. And then Xorg came along to muddy the waters further.... To the extent that this is true (and, as Dave points out, "the GNU userland" is not an indivisible blob of everything), it's only beacuse that's what people care to bother doing. A Linux friend of mine tells me there is, or at least was, a Linux distro that had an almost entirely BSD userland on top of the Linux kernel - about as much GNU code in userland as NetBSD, say, has. I've also heard of Linux userlands[%] running under BSD kernels.) [%] To the extent that such a thing exists - and, no, I do not mean "GNU userlands". I mean, approximately, "a userland a Linux distro might/could/does come with", which typically includes a good deal of non-GNU code. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B