They
also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people's
code. Over time, however, Stallman began to sense that
there was an underlying lack of awareness of the GNU
Project and its objectives when reading Linux
developers' emails.
"We discovered that the people who considered
themselves Linux users didn't care about the GNU
Project," Stallman says. "They said, `Why should I
bother doing these things? I don't care about the GNU
Project. It's working for me. It's working for us Linux
users, and nothing else matters to us.' And that was
quite surprising given that people were essentially
using a variant of the GNU system, and they cared so
little. They cared less than anybody else about GNU."
While some viewed descriptions of Linux as a "variant"
of the GNU Project as politically grasping, Murdock,
already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw
Stallman's request to call Debian's version GNU/Linux
as reasonable. "It was more for unity than for credit,"
he says.
Requests of a more technical nature quickly followed.
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