What is the difference between GNU and Unix philosophy?

Careful...loaded question..I think mainly because there is no real definition of the Unix Philosophy and saying something something will for sure summon someone strongly disagreeing ;)

But for the start...the GNU and the unix philosophy can't be really compared as they don't apply in the same area. GNU philosophy is a political one while Unix philosophie is a technical one...they don't compete with each other, don't exclude each other but also don't promote each other.

GNU philosophy is more about what rights the user should have to the program they use. Most important one is of course access to the source code and right to change it and redistribute the changes.

Unix Philosophy on the other hand is more about how a whole system should work together. I am not really comfortable with using "Philosophy" there at all...it's more a trend that was born with unix the way it is and still proves to be pretty successful. At the core it is maybe something like "Do one job and do it good". The gnu tools for example follow this to some extend...gnu patch only patches source code, it doesn't try to integrate any visual representation of the differences...for that is uses an external editor that is focused on this task.

In the core the Uix philosophy is a pretty good one...it just became a but under attack in the recent systemd clash...because both sides tried to extend it far over the point is ever was used before. Fanatic opponents of systemd used to as argument against a system that consists of many subsystems with all communicating with each other in some way....mainly because they are all delivered under one name. And systemd fanatics brushed of anything that was related to unix philosophy as outdated and kept on mocking it without really understanding what the ideas behind it are...and that systemd very much follows them. Overall...just try to forget about the systemd clash...and ignore everything that was said there. It was probably the single most stupid occurrence in the whole linux history and nobody stayed sane there.

/r/linux Thread