The other person is Richard Stallman.
Stallman largely wants the recognition for his work and the beliefs associated with it. It seems quite fair to me, but I'm not interested in debating that one way or another. Instead, I'm pointing out the name needs correcting because it's getting to a point where I'm seeing even technical people become confused. Quite possibly, it's because software like Steam is now bringing GNU/Linux into the limelight and people are prepared to look at it more seriously.
Yes, I've actually had people ask me if their Android programs would run fine under "Linux", where they meant a GNU/Linux distribution such as Ubuntu. I feel that it's quite unfortunate that it's come to this, and it's only going to get worse if we don't start naming it logically.
We don't call it Adobe/Windows so it's not GNU/Linux.
Last I checked, Adobe software didn't make up the majority of the Windows operating system. In fact, it's not a part of the operating system at all - Windows boots fine without it. For comparison, "GNU" (without the "/Linux") is much more important if you just want to compare user familiarity, lines of code, and perhaps many other metrics. However, the GNU user-land can of course be mixed with different kernels, which would mean binaries built for one kernel may not run under a different kernel, even if the end user cannot distinguish any visual difference between operating systems. I hope that helps to clear up why describing the operating system precisely as both GNU *and* Linux is important.
Besides the reason Android is called Android is because it's a distro name like Ubuntu or Arch.
Just a distro? I think you have just perfectly demonstrated my point - because user-land and kernels can often be mixed and matched in the free software world, people are seriously confused by this! If Android were just another distribution, Android binaries could execute fine on Debian GNU/Linux, Mageia GNU/Linux, etc. Steam could run fine on Android also (as it runs on Debian and Mageia). The truth is that Android, like GNU, is the user-land that makes up the majority of the operating system, but Android and GNU have very little in common and there is basically no application compatibility between them. Clearly then, they are indeed very different operating systems.
