I think Hans is wrong.
Or in the immortal words of Bill Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.
I’m a behaviorist (see B. F. Skinner). I use the black box principle. When identifying what something is, I look at its behavior, its interfaces. I don’t take it apart.
A Windows machine, a MacOS machine, a general Linux machine, a ROCK machine and a Nucleus are different, because they have different behavior. They may have been built from related components, but their interesting characteristics are different.
It’s like saying a Porsche Macan is really an Audi Q5, with higher profit margin. No, it’s not, not if you drive it. What its components are is not the point.
This is really about levels of abstraction. There was a book recently (and a geriatric American politician) that promoted that the internet is just a series of tubes. On a deep down technical level, this is sorta correct, but on any interesting level of abstraction it is completely wrong. Because the water distribution system, the electrical grid, the natural gas pipes are all just “a series of pipes”, just like the internet, but that misses the essence of the internet, the generalizability that has made the internet so much more universally powerful, and has created so much more wealth in 25 years, than the other pipes. At the interesting level of abstraction, it is different.
So is the Nucleus.