Talk:GNU/Archive 2

message: Where can I get this image http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immagine:Nuvola_apps_emacs.png on .svg format?
--Licurgo 17:21, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  where to get this graphic? 

message: #GNU (pronounced ) is a free operating system [...]
#GNU (pronounced ; ) is a free operating system [...]
# (pronounced ) is a free operating system [...]
# is a free operating system [...] The correct pronunciation of GNU is g'noo (IPA: ), [...]
#1 is what the article currently looks like. #2 is probably what User:Aeusoes1 wanted to do. #3 and #4 are some alternatives. Which do you think would be best? --Kjoonlee 01:37, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  is named so because it's a counterpart to . Audio-IPA now uses no underlines. --Kjoonlee 17:27, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

text: To save space. And no they don't; people who've set up their computers that way have been mislead into thinking it's "guh-new" or "guh-noo". --Kjoonlee 17:58, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Audio link 

message: I think we need to add something to the history section. In a speech of his (but one of several sources I remember), RMS says that he initially was going for a replacement of the Lisp machine OSs, and only grudgingly decided to clone Unix:
This would seem to be important. (Besides, does anyone else think that this idea of eventually layering a Lisp-based OS over something else might be the real motive behind the HURD?) -- Gwern  (contribs) 04:08, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lisp and history 

message: There is a proposal to merge GNU Project  into this article.  Please discuss it at  Talk:GNU_Project#Merge_into_GNU. Lentower 19:44, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge [[GNU Project]] here?

message: See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Staff_and_employees_of_the_Free_Software_Foundation.
This new article started as a section in the FSF article, and was split off with no rationale,  discussion, or consensus by User:Chealer (talk|contribs) .
The editors of this GNU article could have good points to make on this AfD. Lentower 18:47, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: See [[Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Staff_and_employees_of_the_Free_Software_Foundation]]

message: The verbal quality and depth of this article, as well as copyright status of images are all really good, and I feel if it were slightly better cited, it could probably get to Good Article status really easily.  Any thoughts? i kan reed 18:27, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This article needs many more in-line citations. Lentower 22:07, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Indeed :) A long way to go though, way too much duplication and little consistency in style (until now there wasn't even a mention of the FSF in the intro for instance). Chris Cunningham 21:00, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Quality article

message: Instead, why not get it up to Featured Article status? Lentower 22:07, 25 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed :) A long way to go though, way too much duplication and little consistency in style (until now there wasn't even a mention of the FSF in the intro for instance). Chris Cunningham 21:00, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Featured Article instead?

message: Thumperward:
With all due respect, your edits contain false information.
Where did you get your information?  Are there other Wikipedia articles that have the wrong information?
Why don't you check out the facts, before you undo my edits?  Or check out this article's History section, as my edit summary noted?  Or check other Wikipeida articles, fsf.org, the WWW, etc. for the facts?  Which are:
*The FSF was founded two years after Richard Stallman started the GNU Project and created the concept of the GNU operating system. Chase down the citations in the History section, etc.
*GNU was the main focus of the FSF for a while, but for more then a decade it's major focus has been furthering the cause of Free Software, of which GNU has become a very small part.  The FSF is putting most of it's effort and budget into further the rights of computer uses, not producing software. Check out fsf.org, especially the press releases for the last decade, etc.
Best, Lentower 05:05, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Apologies. (This is what I get for editing during the holiday season). My main focus was to keep the article flowing well, I wasn't paying sufficient attention to factual accuracy. The current version is markedly better. Chris Cunningham 17:05, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No problem.  I mostly wanted to get the facts right again, and make sure there weren't fixes needed to other WP articles.  I haven't finished reviewing all of your changes yet.  Lentower 01:20, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GNU was '''founded by [[Richard Stallman]]''' and was '''the original focus''' of the [[Free Software Foundation]]

message: "At the time, Unix was (and is) a popular operating system"
* First of all I don't know what you mean by UNIX being popular, Solaris and BSD are not considered quite "popular", and I'm not sure if Mac can be considered pure "UNIX" (and it's debatable if it can be considered "popular" either), to me this sounds like POV pushing.
* Second issue, I don't like the "At the time, UNIX was (and is)", if you decide that's true it's a popular OS then use "UNIX is a popular OS" not "at the time was (and is)" which sounds unnecessarily complicated. -- AdrianTM 19:49, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Alter the wording if you wish. Flavours of UNIX are still probably the most popular proprietary OSs after Microsoft.  Running on enterprise servers, UNIX holds a considerable share of the market. The wording before I made the change suggests the UNIX has suffered the same fate as CP/M.  --Philip Baird Shearer 20:42, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: BTW What makes you think that UNIX was more popular in 1983 than it is now? I suspect that if the article is going to designate the OS as popular in 1983, then it is still popular now because there are, I suspect, far more copies of UNIX running today than there were in 1983. --Philip Baird Shearer 20:52, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I use Opera, there are other couple of millions of Opera users probably more than the no. of users 5 years ago, however that doesn't make it "popular". I didn't find recent numbers but in 2000 it looks like 15% of servers were UNIX servers. I would only assume that the procentage was bigger in the past since they didn't have competition from Windows and Linux server (at least not in 1983). I think it makes sense to say "at the time, was a popular OS" because it was more popular than now. However, this is not a big issue, I'll let other people see the discussion and decide how this small issue should be decided.  -- AdrianTM 00:50, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Trouble is that GNU is Unix-like and this could become a circular argument it is after all GNU not UNIX. It really depends if one believes UNIX to be a set of copyrighted code or an implementation of a methodology. Personally I'd go with the second. all lowercase because the shift key takes more effort, short names to save typing (very useful on very slow connections), multi user very useful when playing games, or in the words of the the early 80's email rpdup "Unix is a lot more complicated of course -- the typical Unix hacker never can remember what the PRINT command is called this week -- but when it gets right down to it, Unix is a glorified video game." --Philip Baird Shearer 17:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think some people conspired to redefine unix, since the popularity of gnu/linux. ;-) --Kim Bruning 18:25, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: UNIX popular OS?

message: I've added refs for the statements that were tagged as needing citations, and I removed one statement that needed a cite but maybe one exists (a statement about FSF hiring 15 programmers at its peak).  A good document for citing is this speech that Stallman gave: http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html
It's good because it has links for each section, so the relevent part can be linked to instead of just linking to the document and leaving it to the reader to find the relevent part - this is important because, for example, the part in that talk where he talks about GNU Hurd doesn't contain the word "Hurd" at all - he keeps calling it the GNU kernel.  So linking to sections is useful there. Gronky 02:08, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  2007-02-21: No "citation needed" tags now 

message: I do believe the Terry Pratchett reference is a mistake. A Gnu is a type of animal. In Terry Pratchett's novels (notably Men At Arms and the Gnome trilogy) Gnu is used as a humorous misunderstanding of the word "gun" (In the Gnome trilogy, there is a small passage where the protagonists are trying to figure out how a character in a thriller novel could hijack a plane with an African grazer). "The Smoking Gnu" would be a reference to The Smoking Gun, a real life conspiracy theorist group. I honestly think its a stretch to declare that Pratchett was making reference to a Unix-like OS....... Patch86 13:37, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yup, in the absence of a direct statement from Pratchett, this kind of kind is simply idle speculation, and should be vaporized on sight. Stan 15:09, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I've deleted it.  Gronky 12:23, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Terry Pratchett

message: Someone has set up WikiProject Free Software.  It has many people listing themselves as participants, but it seems to still need some leadership and some action to develop the project and to build momentum.  Some people from here might be able to help.  Suggestions can be found and made on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Free_Software. Gronky 16:29, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[WP:WPFS|WikiProject Free Software]] needs help 

message: this is the new versionf of gnu, but I don't know where I can put this information and how.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
--208.104.151.215 15:05, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is about the GNU operating system. Please work on the article about the GNU General Public License if you can contribute to it. -- mms 15:28, 1 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  who are going to talk about GNU GPL v3? 

message: Here's an interesting comment on RMS's style of project management for the GNU OS:
:http://lwn.net/Articles/272957/
Might be worth referencing in the article. --Gronky (talk) 01:11, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting yes, but more of an anecdotal observation, not really an authoritative source that we can rely on. Stan (talk) 12:31, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Development philosophy 

message: The redirect link GNU/Linux has recently been changed to link here instead of linking to Linux.  I think that's a mistake.  This article is about the GNU operating system, which doesn't include the Linux kernel.  The article called Linux is about the operating system made by combining GNU and the Linux kernel.  So I think GNU/Linux should point there, even if the article's name ("Linux") is badly chosen. --Gronky (talk) 19:24, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: This was fixed 14:25, 20 February 2009 by Stevenj.   Kiore (talk) 06:38, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  GNU/Linux probably shouldn't link here 

message: An IP is repeatedly adding the article to :Category:Sociology. While I see the point and I understand the motivation, I highly doubt it is a good idea. GNU is an operating system; if anything the category should perhaps be added to the general concepts of Free software, open source or the like (also in these cases I doubt it is the right cat, but at least it makes more sense). --Cyclopiatalk 12:56, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this article belongs to the sociology category. It is a project to "fix the society" if you will. There's this other editor who disagrees and we're having a lovely little edit war. Please do partake! :) 85.77.165.59 (talk) 13:19, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It doesn't belong in the category. Yworo (talk) 15:45, 12 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Your opinion is quite worthless without your reasoning, if any. 85.77.165.59 (talk) 12:45, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: GNU belongs to the :Category:GNU Project. In turn, this belongs to :Category:Free Software Foundation, which in turn belongs to :Category:Free and open source software organizations, which belongs to :Category:Free software culture and organizations and :Category:Nonprofit technology. The latter belongs to :Category:Technology in society, which belongs to :Category:Society. So, yes, GNU already belongs to :Category:Society through the subcategories hierarchy. No need to add it directly to an upper level category. --Cyclopiatalk 18:29, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Sociology 

message: An OS requires a working kernel. The GNU project does not have a working kernel. This means either that GNU is incomplete or that it is not an operating system. You can't have it both ways. Either we describe it as incomplete, or as an unfinished project, or as a collection of userland packages. It is POV to claim it to be an operating system when it does not have its own kernel. If people insist on calling it an OS, it should be redirected to GNU/Linux, because that is the primary way people solve the problem of its incompleteness. The reference given says that GNU is incomplete because the kernel is incomplete. Yworo (talk) 13:42, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  GNU is either not an OS or it is incomplete 

message: As I am sure most of you are aware, we cannot rely on primary sources (i.e. the GNU project and/or the FSF) for the information in this article. This article appears to be written from a fan's point of view based on claims of the organization producing the product. Yworo (talk) 13:57, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Some primary sources are allowed if care is taken. There is nothing untowards, say, about quoting gnu.org's website with an attribution to the website in the text itself, so readers know straight off where it came from. Gwen Gale (talk) 14:08, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There is when the GNU project's claim that GNU is an operating system is taken over the definition of an operating system, which requires a working kernel. Also, it would be better if third-party sources were used, wouldn't it? Yworo (talk) 14:11, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no harm whatsoever with putting their (verifiable as having been made) claim into the article text. Likewise, it would be helpful to cite secondary sources (what you call "third party") which both dispute that claim and support it. Gwen Gale (talk) 15:05, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no problem with that and intend to wait 24 hours before making another change myself in any case. Though I wish all the involved users would join the discussion on this talk page to work out consensus wording. I don't think GNU variants such as GNU/Linux should be used in the lead to justify a claim that GNU is finished, though. Linux was never made with the intention of completing GNU, is not part of the GNU project, and never was. Yworo (talk) 16:05, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The thing to do here is follow what the sources say. If they don't say the same things, deal with that in the text, too. As for the software, as it happens, I've been using GNU software here and there (on FreeBSD) for years and truth be told, when I was asked to look at this, I wasn't even aware they were still hoping to release a stable OS. Gwen Gale (talk) 16:18, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, this wasn't where I'd intended to post, but discussing sources does seem the next thing to do. The non-GNU sources I've cited use the word "incomplete". Specifically, they say that GNU as an OS is incomplete because it's kernel is incomplete.  I'm not sure that FSF has ever described GNU as a complete operating system, except in the context of "GNU variants" or as a future goal. I'd like to see one reliable source that described GNU as a completed, production-ready, operating system rather than as a project with that goal. Yworo (talk) 16:31, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to me, the big worry other editors have is only with the wording of the lead. I would think that in the following text, sundry sources and adjectives wouldn't be taken as misleading and would give readers a thorough overview of cited outlooks on the kernel. Gwen Gale (talk) 22:55, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Primary sources 

message: Someone has changed the subject of the article from GNU to GNU/Linux, which has its own article. This change should be reverted. Yworo (talk) 16:56, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious 

message: Background: The incompleteness of GNU has been discussed for a number of years, with (primarily) GNU proponents always removing the word without providing supporting sources for GNU's completeness. Some of the more recent discussions can be found in these section of this talk page:
:#Incomplete
:#Operating System?
:#GNU is either not an OS or it is incomplete
:#Primary sources
The proposed version of the lead paragraph is:
:GNU () is a computer operating system composed entirely of free software. It is currently incompleteVaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Opinion: The top 10 operating system stinkers" in Computerworld, April 9, 2009: "But after more than 25 years in development, GNU remains incomplete: Its kernel, Hurd, has never really made it out of the starting blocks. ... Almost no one has actually been able to use the OS; it's really more a set of ideas than an operating system." as GNU Hurd, its official kernel, is not yet production-ready,Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, p. 54. Random House, Inc., 2001. . Referring to Stallman, Lessig wrote, "He had mixed all of the ingredients needed for an operating system to function, but he was missing the core." but production use is possible using a Linux kernel or other free kernel. Its name is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!” This name was chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code. Development of GNU was initiated by Richard Stallman and was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Is the word "incomplete" adequately sourced for the lead paragraph? Yworo (talk) 16:14, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  RFC: Is the word "incomplete" adequately sourced for the lead paragraph? 

message: *: "The current state is still far from being on par with Debian's established Linux ports, but it is mostly up to date and reasonably usable." added by Yworo (talk) 17:19, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a status update from the project itself. We need third-party sources. Yworo (talk) 16:51, 5 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Supporting completeness (or being finished, usable, etc.)