Good GNUs

Eric Berry’s article about the Takeda prize (“Stallman to Receive $830K”, published on November 13) refers to GNU and Linux, but not quite accurately. GNU is an operating system, but its name (GNU’s Not Unix) has nothing to do with Linux; it refers to GNU’s compatibility with Unix. Linux, however, is not an operating system, but a kernel, one of the important components of an operating system. For that reason, the term “Linux operating system” is a misnomer. Berry was probably thinking of the popular GNU/Linux system, a version of GNU in which Linux is used as the kernel. See the page for more explanation. Finally, $830,000 is the total prize; since it is being shared by three people, each of us will get a third of that.

Richard Stallman
AI Lab Research Affiliate