2 Sep
2012
2 Sep
'12
8 a.m.
On 2 September 2012 14:59, Doc <doc at vaxen.net> wrote:
Fair enough.
Your comment that ?RMS fiercely fought (may still do) Linux's
"takeover" of the GNU environment? seemed harsh to me, but looking
back, I think you were misinterpreting /me/ and thus /in context/ it
was not so harsh.
When I said "Linux 'took over' GNU", I don't mean that the former
own
or dominates the latter or anything like that. All I'm getting at is
that it's the default pairing. The BSDs have their own userlands to go
with their own kernels (notwithstanding Debian k/FreeBSD et al); the
open-Solaris-distros such as Illumos, Belenix, Schillix etc. I believe
still use a Sun libc and graft a GNU userland /beside/ rather than
/instead of/ the Oracle one.
The various incarnations of the HURD are very minority offerings
indeed and most of the other Unix-like kernels have their own
userland. You pretty much only get the GNU userland on Linux and you
pretty much only get Linux underneath the GNU userland.
That is all I meant when I said "takeover".
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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On 9/1/12 9:50 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
I'll take your word. I am fairly ignorant of the BSD world - the only
BSD I've ever managed to install and get to boot up to a GUI was
PC-BSD, which is kinda cheating.
I was under the impression that for many years, in the XFree86 era,
the BSDs maintained their own X.11 servers, and Solaris still does,
the last time I looked - it offers the Sun X server for Sun graphics
hardware and X.org for non-Sun kit.
I have no experience with AIX on x86, only on RIOS/ROMP, but AFAIAA,
all the commercial Unices still maintain their own X servers, or did
until they died.
Was XFree86 /never/ just a Linux-on-x86 project?
X.org isn't a Linux thing any more, either -
it also runs on the BSDs
and Solaris and probably other Unices too.
X.org, nee XFree86, never was a Linux thing, any more than GNU. Like the
GNU environment, it started as a cross-platform Free implementation of
commercial unix tools. As far as I know or can remember, neither X.org or
XFree86 ever existed as a Linux-only implementation. If in another
decade people still have control of their own computers
and can do whatever they want with them and the data on them, it will
be because of RMS and nobody else.
And frankly, for all that he can be ornery or whatever, at the end of
the day, the world could not thank him enough for that. People have
won Nobel prizes for a lot less.
I won't argue that at all. As a matter of fact, I may have *said* all
that a time or 20...