Z:gnu-www-ja-sco-v-ibm--428b76-It is crucial to clarify certa/en

It is crucial to clarify certain confusions that SCO's spokesmen have shown no disposition to dispel. In the first place, SCO has used &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; to mean &ldquo;all free software,&rdquo; or &ldquo;all free software constituting a Unix-like operating system.&rdquo; This confusion, which the Free Software Foundation warned against in the past, is here shown to have the misleading consequences the Foundation has often predicted. &ldquo;Linux&rdquo; is the name of the kernel most often used in free software systems. But the operating system as a whole contains many other components, some of them products of the Foundation's GNU Project, others written elsewhere and published under free software licenses; the totality is GNU, the free operating system on which we have been working since 1984. Approximately half GNU's components are copyrighted works of the Free Software Foundation, including the C-compiler GCC, the GDB debugger, the C library Glibc, the bash shell, among other essential parts. The combination of GNU and the Linux kernel produces the GNU/Linux system, which is widely used on a variety of hardware and which taken as a whole duplicates the functions once only performed by the Unix operating system.