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by user911302966 5497 days ago
I think that the GNU+Linux attribution is accurate and deserved. The author of this page thought it fair to use SLOC as his unit of measurement; I think that "fundamentality" is a far fairer unit.

Anyone that thinks that "GNU" should be dropped from the "GNU/LINUX" should be using alternate cp, rm, ln, etc. Or just use NetBSD (do this anyway).
1 comments
forensic 5497 days ago
The biggest GNU contributions are gcc, gdb and emacs.

Command line stuff is trivial. GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have. The same cannot be said for gcc, gdb and emacs.

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evgen 5497 days ago
> GNU made them for free first, but if they hadn't, someone else would have.

Chnage that to "GNU re-packaged or re-wrote versions of utilities that had existed for quite a while in the BSD world, but if they hadn't, someone would have just used the BSD version" and you would be closer to reality. GCC is really the only lingering semi-dependency and as clang improves to the point where it takes fewer patches to build around GCC-specific bits of the kernel the remaining contributions will become nice to have but not essential.

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