Unix is a lot more amenable than most older OSes to being implemented by a disparate group of people with limited communication, hence why GNU was originally set up as a reimplementation of unix.
It’s about Unix, and GNU’s Not happens to be the best implementation of it. Which is why macOS copies pieces of it, despite needing to use obsolete versions in order to comply with Apple’s hatred for end-user freedom.
I think you’re actually making the point for him here. You are correct that GNU is not Unix. And what version of ls has the most installations? I betcha it’s the ls from GNU Coreutils. I do agree that GNU tools are sometimes too maximalist. But they are also more useful than the minimalist alternatives.
"Those of us who used such programs, either from GNU or from other, similarly freely licensed software, knew that we were using high-quality code."
I don't know whether to call this nonsense, lies, or both. I'll go for both. In the real UNIX(R) circles, GNU is notorious for being horribly hacked-together software. For example GNU tar implements decompression, or GNU grep implements recursive searching, something handled by find(1) and xargs(1) on a real UNIX, the modular way. GNU always implemented tools within tools, breaking modularity and teaching an entire generation how to use a UNIX-like system wrong, according to the "works on my machine!" principle. Now we have an entire generation which grew up on GNU, brainwashed into oblivion thinking GNU is the pinnacle of high quality software. I'm disgusted to no end.
If you want high quality software, go for one of the illumos-based distributions, which is a true, SVR 4.0 open source UNIX, written by engineers with formal education in computer science instead of amateurs who think they know how UNIX is supposed to work. There's really no replacement for the real thing.
unix comes out of "worse is better". GNU comes out of The Right Thing.
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