Comment Articles

SCO smear campaign can't defeat GNU community

Richard Stallman ZDNet US

Published: 26 Jun 2003 15:00 BST

SCO's contract dispute with IBM has been accompanied by a smear campaign against the whole GNU/Linux system. But SCO made an obvious mistake when it erroneously quoted me as saying that "Linux is a copy of Unix." Many readers immediately smelled a rat -- not only because I did not say that, and not only because the person who said it was talking about published ideas (which are uncopyrightable) rather than code, but because they know I would never compare Linux with Unix.

Unix is a complete operating system, but Linux is just part of one. SCO is using the popular confusion between Linux and the GNU/Linux system to magnify the fear that it can spread. GNU/Linux is the GNU operating system running with Linux as the kernel. The kernel is the part of the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs you run. That part is Linux.

We developed GNU starting in 1984 as a campaign for freedom, whose aim was to eliminate non-free software from our lives. GNU is free software, meaning that users are free to run it, study it and change it (or pay programmers to do this for them), redistribute it (gratis or for a fee), and publish modified versions. (See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html.)

In 1991, GNU was mostly finished, lacking only a kernel. In 1992, Linus Torvalds made his kernel, Linux, free software. Others combined GNU and Linux to produce the first complete free operating system, GNU/Linux. (See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html.) GNU/Linux is also free software, and SCO made use of this freedom by selling their version of it. Today, GNU runs with various kernels including Linux, the GNU Hurd (our kernel), and the NetBSD kernel. It is basically the same system, whichever kernel you use.

Those who combined Linux with GNU didn't recognise that's what they were doing, and they spoke of the combination as "Linux". The confusion spread; many users and journalists call the whole system "Linux". Since they also properly call the kernel "Linux", the result is even more confusion: when a statement says "Linux", you can only guess what software it refers to. SCO's irresponsible statements are shot through with ambiguous references to "Linux". It is impossible to attribute any coherent meaning to them overall, but they appear to accuse the entire GNU/Linux system of being copied from Unix.

The name GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". The whole point of developing the GNU system is that it is not Unix. Unix is and always was non-free software, meaning that it denies its users the freedom to cooperate and to control their computers. To use computers in freedom as a community, we needed a free software operating system. We did not have the money to buy and liberate an existing system, but we did have the skill to write a new one. Writing GNU was a monumental job. We did it for our freedom, and your freedom.