Date:	Thu, 6 Feb 92 20:20:34 EST
From:	dogwood!francis AT gatech DOT edu (John Stracke)
To:	djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject:	LINUX?(!) answer
Status:	O

Tried to reply just to the guy who posted, but the mail system can't
parse maple.decnet.  Sorry if most people here know this stuff.

>What is this LINUX stuff?  Is there an archive site where I can possibly
>get a readme file?  Is it System V or BSD or Mach based?  Is it freeware?

As was already said here, it is free and is a rewrite, not a port; so
it's not (necessarily) based on any of the above.  What it's most
like, I don't know; I would bet it's vanilla POSIX1.

>What does it support?

What what does it support?

>Does anyone know if there is going to be a Gnu-supported X-Windowing

There is; it's called gwm.  It's supposed to be pretty good; instead
of (or maybe in addition to) having something like an .mwmrc, it's
programmable in Lisp, like Gnumacs, which would give *much* greater
flexibility.  We'd be running it here if we hadn't committed to Motif
a couple of years before gwm came out (gwm apparently doesn't have the
widgets that Motif provides, and nobody wanted to rewrite our multi-
100Kiloline software to use gwm instead :-).

>system?  If Gnu/FSF writes an operating system, is all code written for

They're working on it.  It's called GNU, and it's apparently in early
development versions (i.e., runs, but isn't even good enough for beta)
already.  That was always their idea; they just started out by writing
utilities for Unix, because they knew nobody'd want to run GNU if they
didn't have the important utilities already.

>it going to have to be copyleft?  Or only code written _with_ it?

This is really a question for gnu.misc.discuss, but my guess is that
GPLL (General Public Library License) would apply to stuff written
with GNU libraries whether done on GNU or on any other OS.  What
exactly that means is still a topic of debate; go ask gnu.misc.discuss
whether bison's output is copylefted (but stand back!).

/===========================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke         |My opinions are my own.                    |
|Natl. Science Center Foundation|===========================================|
|Augusta, GA                    |Until you stalk and overrun, you can't     |
|francis AT dogwood DOT atl DOT ga DOT us      |  devour anyone.--Hobbes                   |
\===========================================================================/
(Formerly francis AT zaphod DOT uchicago DOT edu)

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