Christopher J. Buckley

I saw on my RSS feed at Linux-Watch an interesting feed: Dear Mr. Gates, Save Vista – Open Source it.

Unfortunately, whilst the author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols presents a good article, he lets down his entire article by stating that..

…without the advantage of having any of Unix’s source code, Linus Torvalds created an open operating system

I feel very depressed when I read this, completely inaccurate, assertion.

Let us be clear: Linus Torvalds did -not- create an Operating System. For a journalist with the experience of Mr. Vaughan-Nichols, he should know better.

Unfortunately, it is mis-information like the quoted paragraph above that leads to the devaluation of the visionary work done by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation in creating the GNU Operating System. Linus Torvalds managed to, brillianty, create a (monolithic) kernel which was integrated into the GNU system. This Operating System should be, correctly, referred to as the GNU/Linux Operating System.

Sorry to rant about this, but the (commonly held, but incorrect) belief that Linus created an Operating System and called it ‘Linux’ really needs clarification. Perhaps someone would be so kind to point Mr. Vaughan-Nichols at this article….?