However, there are some nuances to the original argument that made it less ridiculous than it may seem at first. The primary toolchain was GCC, in particular with GLIBC. Unlike say Win32, glibc defined the standard of shared libraries and dynamic linking on early Linux OS's. The kernel was not complete, in the sense that it didn't handle typical user space programs or programming languages.
It was the set of GNU tools that provided the full abstraction needed to compile and run programs on it. For the typical Linux OS the GNU parts were integral and central to having a working OS. That is, Linux wasn't comparable to say Windows as an OS, but GNU/Linux was.
This is still true of desktop Linux's today, like Ubuntu. The user-space ABI is still defined by the GNU toolchain. This is of course not the only possible use of Linux, and you can use it on systems without the GNU tools (I don't know which do this, perhaps embedded systems). Also notable is that the LLVM project now is close to replacing all of the original GNU tools.
Yes, you are correct, and that's a really good way of describing the significance of their technical contribution. Still (as you know), there were a few other pieces the OS needed to truly replace Windows that GNU did not provide - BASH and X.org being two - but the operating system definitely would not be what it is today w/o GNU.
Interesting that you bring up LLVM. Linux's "cousin", FreeBSD, is in the process of swapping their entire toolchain out from GNU to LLVM, quite successfully so far.
Firstly, I agree.
However, there are some nuances to the original argument that made it less ridiculous than it may seem at first. The primary toolchain was GCC, in particular with GLIBC. Unlike say Win32, glibc defined the standard of shared libraries and dynamic linking on early Linux OS's. The kernel was not complete, in the sense that it didn't handle typical user space programs or programming languages.
It was the set of GNU tools that provided the full abstraction needed to compile and run programs on it. For the typical Linux OS the GNU parts were integral and central to having a working OS. That is, Linux wasn't comparable to say Windows as an OS, but GNU/Linux was.
This is still true of desktop Linux's today, like Ubuntu. The user-space ABI is still defined by the GNU toolchain. This is of course not the only possible use of Linux, and you can use it on systems without the GNU tools (I don't know which do this, perhaps embedded systems). Also notable is that the LLVM project now is close to replacing all of the original GNU tools.
Yes, you are correct, and that's a really good way of describing the significance of their technical contribution. Still (as you know), there were a few other pieces the OS needed to truly replace Windows that GNU did not provide - BASH and X.org being two - but the operating system definitely would not be what it is today w/o GNU.
Interesting that you bring up LLVM. Linux's "cousin", FreeBSD, is in the process of swapping their entire toolchain out from GNU to LLVM, quite successfully so far.
I'm honestly thinking to move for a period to FreeBSD just to see the cons and pros even because I enjoy the BSD license better than the GPL