[wplug] In closing

[Tim Lesher]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 01:59:17PM -0500, Michael M Delaney wrote:
> Just to play devils advocate (or something along those lines),
> what about, for example, X?  X is not under a GNU liscense, and neither is
> Mozilla, so should we become the Western
> PA GNU/X/Mozilla/OtherLiscense/Linux Users Group?

It's not a question of license--it's a question of software.  GNU is
not a license; it's a set of software (for example, tar, make, gcc,
etc.).  Not all GNU software is GPL'ed (eg, glibc), and not all GPL'ed
software is part of GNU (eg, Linux).

RMS's reasoning is that on a Linux-based system, the majority of the
software (in terms of individual utilities and programs installed, not
in terms of lines-of-code) comes from the GNU project.  Whether or not
that's still true given the rise of non-GNU software in distributions
is arguable.

It's also arguable whether it's relevant in terms of the user
experience, for the same reason--it's probable that most of the
(KDE-based or GNOME-based) applications a typical user will encounter
are not part of GNU, either.

In any event, I usually end up referring to a distribution by its
professed name (such as RedHat Enterprise Linux, or Debian GNU/Linux)
anyway, so it's usually a moot point for me, if not for WPLUG.

-- 
Tim Lesher <tim at lesher.ws>
http://www.lesher.ws