User:Adroit/WP Bug: the missing GNU

Many, many moons ago, when I was just a wee little lad, a guy set out to build a thing. What kind of thing? Doesn't matter right now. All that matters is that it was meant to meet a special, particular goal that had never been met before, filling what he believed to be an major gap in society. But it was no easy task. In fact, it was such a huge project, that the guy knew he'd need a giant community of volunteers to build it. So he came up with a name (one which hints at the special goal), for the thing and its community of volunteers - a short, three-letter acronym for the entire project. Then he recruited some help and got to work. As time went on, the project had become a large global community, all trying to build this same big thing. And build it they did! Gradually, countless individuals constructed a plethora of different pieces that fit together smoothly. All because they wanted to help reach that special goal I mentioned.

Eventually, their work was good enough that they got the full thing to actually work. (That's a good thing - just think of the thing as a car, for example.) People started to use it everywhere, even while unpolished, especially because it was the first thing of its kind that doesn't cost any money. It's so common today that even you use it, all the time, even though you almost certainly haven't heard of it. Anyway, it still wasn't completely done, years later - in fact there was one big piece in particular that was struggling. They call it the kernel. If that makes you think of corn, you're only one letter off -- it means something more like core, which should give you an idea as to why this piece is taking so long to get right.

While the project did have a working kernel, some other guy somewhere else in the world had a better one. (Well, it worked better, anyway.) So what? Well here's the thing - these types of builders are known to be lazy, and really don't like doing work that someone else already did. So all of those people using the thing at home, just threw this other guy's kernel in instead, and it worked. This was despite the fact that the other guy was not part of the project, nor was his kernel, and most importantly, he didn't have any of the same goals in mind when he made his kernel. His kernel, which is named after... him, actually, was built while he was a student, evidently just 'for fun'. Still, when you threw in this other kernel, things worked better at the time. It's what they might call a hack, and everyone seemed fine with this temporary fix.

Except for the part where... it wasn't actually temporary. Remember that laziness? Few people continued working on the real kernel, so to this day, almost everyone is using the foreign substitute. It's just become a de facto, accepted part of the system. And there isn't really anything wrong with that, so who cares, right? The project continues to see success to this day, and it's all just one big, happy ending. Heck, it's even got it's own page, nay, it's own category - nay - set of categories - on the fifth most popular website on Earth, the free encyclopedia. Better yet? That encyclopedia is a project started to meet the same kind of special goal! Woo!

Oh, by the way, if you're looking for the article on this big collaborative project thing we're talking about, it's under the name of that other guy's kernel.

Woah, wait - what?

''How could this happen? You mean to tell me that they renamed it to be the same as that other guy's kernel?''

Nope. The project's name never changed. Apparently, some of those people that were using it just started calling it that.

''So their project is left out of the name completely? So basically that one guy is getting credit for what all those people did?''

Well, yeah. But don't worry, the media does it too. So it's okay.

I can't help but agree with you if this situation makes you a little peeved. If it doesn't, you probably already know what I've been talking about, and there's probably no way I'm going to talk you out of your corporate-fed lingo rationalization. As for the rest of you, the project we've been referring to is the GNU Project, and thing they were trying to make was an Operating system. You don't need to know what that is, however, to see how wrong it is to title the article for some thing after a single, foreign piece of that thing. That piece is known as Linux. Make no mistake, "Linux" is the kernel made by that other guy, Linus -- not an operating system. As it stands, the current article purveys this confusion. Here are the facts:
 * GNU is an Operating System.
 * One piece of an Operating System is the kernel. The Gnu project has one, named Hurd.
 * GNU is often instead used with another kernel called Linux.
 * The media and industry have taken to calling this "Linux".
 * Linux is, of course, not an operating system. GNU is.
 * That said, there is a name which lets you know a different kernel has been added: GNU/Linux.
 * This name has the endorsement from those responsible for the creation of the project.
 * Despite all this, our encyclopedia, which should ideally correct misnomers rather than perpetuate them, still titles the article "Linux".