Did the GNU Project condemn and oppose use of Linux in the early days?
We did not adopt Linux as our kernel, but we didn’t condemn or oppose it. In 1993 we started discussing the arrangements to sponsor the development of Debian GNU/Linux. We also sought to cooperate with the people who were changing some GNU packages for use with Linux. We wanted to include their changes in the standard releases so that these GNU packages would work out-of-the-box in combination with Linux. But the changes were often ad-hoc and nonportable; they needed to be cleaned up for installation. The people who had made the changes showed little interest in cooperating with us. One of them actually told us that he didn’t care about working with the GNU Project because he was a “Linux user”. That came as a shock, because the people who ported GNU packages to other systems had generally wanted to work with us to get their changes installed. Yet these people, developing a system that was primarily based on GNU, were the first (and still practically the only) group that was unwilling
