Can there be Linux systems without GNU?
It is possible to make a system that uses Linux as the kernel but is not based on GNU. I’m told there are small systems, used for embedded development, that include Linux but not the GNU system. IBM was once rumored to be planning to put Linux as the kernel into AIX; whether or not they actually tried to do this, it is theoretically possible. What conclusions can we draw from this about the naming of various systems? People who think of the kernel as more important than all the rest of the system say, “They all contain Linux, so let’s call them all Linux systems.” But any two of these systems are mostly different, and calling them by the same name is misleading. (It leads people to think that the kernel is more important than all the rest of the system, for instance.) In the small embedded systems, Linux may be most of the system; perhaps “Linux systems” is the right name for them. They are very different from GNU/Linux systems, which are more GNU than Linux. The hypothetical IBM syste
