[lawfulfalafel]

Okay, how about this: build a Linux distribution using no GNU software.

If you don't think it's critical, try to get by without it.

RMS is a good guy, and I think that his effort to make foundational efforts remembered is equally laudable.

[maweaver]

I think this would be very interesting to see. I know there is Plan 9 from User Space that could provide cat, ls, grep, sed, etc, although the parameters are different so most scripts would probably break. Someone mentioned Clang as an alternative to gcc. The biggest hurdle would probably be glibc.

In reality, I think even if you came up with alternatives that had the same functionality as the GNU software, so many Linux programs have probably assumed GNU that patching everything to work would be a colossal undertaking.

[joeshaw]

Android would probably be a pretty good starting place. They have (nearly?) no GNU code in their distributions.

[omouse]

I wanted to say that Haiku OS has done it but then again...I'm sure they use some GNU code somewhere.

[lamnk]

Haiku OS is not based on linux kernel

[omouse]

No, but it does rely on GNU.