[Info-vax] VMS on Raspberry Pi 5

[Richard Kettlewell]

kludge at panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
> The Natural Philosopher  <tnp at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

>>> There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal
>>> of portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do,
>>> but wanting isn’t getting.
>>
>>Who will bell the cat?
>
> GNU always has as its primary goal that of providing portable
> system-level tools.

That is ahistorical. The primary goal has always been production of a
complete free operating system, not just component parts that could run
elsewhere. See either the GNU manifesto or indeed the current project
standards, which still categorise Linux as secondary to the GNU kernel.

Portability of some components (e.g. language implementations) has
obvious advantages for that goal, at least until it’s been realized, but
that’s a means to an end, and it’s nowhere stated as a primary goal.

> For a long time, Linux was the kernel and GNU provided most of the
> actual environment in the distribution.
>
> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a
> concept took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the
> GNU environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix
> environment and philosophy...  now it is just a mess.

Linux took off because it was a usable free platform that was easy to
download and run, and easy to contribute to. At the point it got going
the GNU kernel wasn’t ready (still isn’t) and BSD was mired in
lawsuits. Change either of those and history would have been quite
different.

-- 
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/