On Mon, 2004-11-01 at 15:15, lau@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 02:04:36PM -0600, Jan Depner wrote: > > No disrespect intended to Richard Stallman and the GNU crowd. The OS > > wouldn't exist without those tools but the tools are not part of the > > OS. They are merely applications that are bundled in with the > > distribution. > > > > Given the more widely accepted definition of an operating system I think > > it is perfectly acceptable to speak of Linux as a standard. > > This is a gray area, but I think that you cannot just say that the gnu > tools are _not_ a part of the operating system. > > Would you say that the startup scripts are _not_ a part of the OS ? > All the startup scripts that I've seen rely are parts of gnu coreutils. > > I think that qualifies as being _part_ of the OS. Nope. A startup script is just a startup script. Grub is not part of the operating system either. The OS is, by definition, the kernel. An interesting thing to consider is RTLinux. Linux is *not* the OS in RTLinux. The RT microkernel is the OS. Linux is merely the idle process. I guess you could say it's part of the OS since it is in the inner loop so to speak. And, speaking of which, has anyone taken a look at Monta Vista's Open Source Real-Time Linux Project in relation to audio? It's using a lot of Ingo's patches. Jan
