A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn’t written by me.
Here’s the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.
We don’t use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.
-Richard Stallman
Stallman is so full of himself, it’s crazy. If it wasn’t for Linus Torvalds’ kernel, his OS utilities would have never taken off. The popularity of Linux is mostly around the server space. Do you really think that GNU with the Hurd kernel would have been sold by corporations, in the way RedHat did, allowing for the domination of the server space that this Operating System now has? Linux got popular, and people bundled FSF tools and their own tools with it, to make complete systems. That’s all that happened. The fact that some of Stallman’s tools got bundled doesn’t mean he has any claim over the name of the entire Operating System. These distributioms would have never existed without Linux, so people call it Linux for short. You are the one that should be asking the Linux community to give you, the FSF and you tools some attribution. But if we do give attribution to other parts of a complete Operating System, then Ubuntu should be called Ubuntu GNU/X11/Wayland/Systemd/APT/Snapd/GNOME/Linux, don’t you think? And if we add all of these tools in, then doesn’t that mean we should also give attribution to all the other tools and utilities bundled on a Ubuntu iso, such as Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. Where can you really draw the line? I draw it at Linux. The Debian team decided to give you attribution. Most distros didn’t because they decided that your utilities are not important enough to add to the naming, or because rhe rest of the world has decided to just call it Linux, because according to them, that’s the part that deserves attribution.
Please forgive any spelling mistakes, I was on a phone. You see how I asked people to forgive my spelling mistakes? That’s the way you, RMS, should ask people to give some attribution to your software.