Re: About satandrads and politics

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Bud Beckman wrote:

> Yep! That is something I was hollering about when I first started to put
> my hands on a computer keyboard. We are consumers looking for the best
> buy and not the best standard, sorry to say. 

Standards are ultimately good for consumers. So all other things equal,
standards compliance gives the consumer a better deal. Note that
in this example, removing standard utilities has no clear benefit for the
user ...

> What is the OS? The kernal, the 700 or so kb? The kernal and modules? I
> don't know. I can be wrong, often am, but I thought Linus wrote the first
> kernal and more or less made it public domain, GPL.

You could call the "OS" just that. However, in practice, the OS is
something closer to the kernel, and the POSIX subsystem ( if you remove
the POSIX subsystem, you will be left with something very broken ... ).
One could even argue that X is part of the OS since it's in every
distribution and it's an essential component.

BTW, "GPL" != "public domain".

> distribution is the same? No. Maybe just the installation is different
> and the standards are inherently the same.

This is more or less correct. The differences are mostly cosmetic, which
is why a program compiled on one distribution will always compile
on another ( in fact will also usually compile on any commercial UNIX )