Linux without the GNU toolchain 5109

Mark South

This is far out of my league, but what the heck;

Look to Darwin, which is -- as far as I know -- sort of FreeBSDish (ie. no gnu) that runs on top of the Mach microkernel. This means that at some point, the Darwin project must have separated out some kind of FreeBSD kernel personality that is available-visible to all the FreeBSD-descendent userland tools and libs for Darwin, and hides the Mach kernel. So I suppose you could do something similar; write a BSD-personality for the Linux kernel and run some kind of BSD userland stuff on top. Not a small task, but obviously it's possible ...

Alternatively; just forget about the Linux kernel as well, and run FreeBSD ... then at least you'd get access to the FreeBSD ports collection. I suppose a hybrid-homegrown Linux kernel-BSD userland system wouldn't run any app easily at all ... :-

Finally, I'd like to add my point of view; Even if you'd get rid of all the gnu tools, so that you could call your system Linux and not GNU-Linux, the Linux kernel, and lots of other code not originating from FSF, would still be under the GPL licence. I think the GPL vs. BSD-... (insert you favourite licencing scheme here) discussion is more interesting than the "GNU-Linux" vs. "Linux" name discussion, and your whole project sounds like lotta work just to erase four characters from a label. I personally don't have anything against FSF taking credit for all the GNU-code used in various Linux distros.

-- jon martin solaas