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GNU's a little more than some userland tools thrown in for good measure. It is actually an operating system. If you look at the posix spec, which defines what a real "unix" should have and how it should behave, there's a tremendous amount of libraries and little tools (like how, for example, 'sed' is mandatory).
If you look at a barebones installed unix-like system, most of these utilities and libraries actually come from GNU.
In these days of X and GUI-goodness, they don't seem very important anymore, but nevertheless, they are needed to be able to claim one has a full unix-like operating system. As for credit hogging, a lot of work went into writing GNU, and most of it was not rockstar-programming like kernel work. Most of the people who wrote GNU wrote it with a specific reason. That those people make a plea to call it by a name that would acknowledge those reasons, is neither unreasonable nor overly burdensome, and most importantly, not mandatory.
As such, I don't feel it's "misplaced", or a "bunch of misguided rhetoric". >Can't we simply be happy for an engineer who fully deserves the recognition he's getting? Of course, any money in Linus' pocket is well spent. His approach to online collaborative development advanced the entire industry! ( the kernel is, of course, a great achievement as well, just not quite as remarkable ) |