Yavor Doganov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted
[EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Wed, 08 Oct 2008
08:13:27 +0000:
> But there are other, non-technical reasons to say "GNU/Linux", and over
> the years I've figured out that the most vocal opponents of the name are
> people who are shy to make associations with GNU, mostly because they
> avoid talking about software freedom.
Hehe, not me. I even quote Stallman on freedom in my sig. Further, I've
made it widely known that in general I couldn't legally run slaveryware
(in the sense of the sig) even if I wanted to, because I no longer agree
to EULAs or sign away my software freedoms, nor even in the case there's
proprietaryware without requiring that, will I agree to waive the rights
to damages for software I can't take a look at to see what it actually
does, or at my option have a trusted friend evaluate it for me, without
compromising either my or my trusted friend's rights to develop similar
software based on the same ideas (thus the "shared source" concept
doesn't work). If someone doesn't respect the natural human rights of
the potential users of his software on the outside of the black-box he
wishes them to run, who /knows/ what sort of tricks he's pulling inside,
where he expects no one to see?
Thus, there aren't many that are stricter in that regard than I (tho
there are some, I don't personally have a big issue with closed firmware
at this point...), and I absolutely put a big value on software freedom,
to the point that while I'm not sure I'd die for it if it came to it,
I've anticipated perhaps being imprisoned, and any failure in that
regard, I regard as a /personal/ failure to live up to my own beliefs.
How many can truthfully say that? Yet I don't see the big deal about
GNU/Linux, either. Yes, I know various people made various parts of it,
Linus only started the kernel, and GNU software plays a big part as
well. However, neither one is the majority of the code many run these
days, or even the plurality in many cases. And no, I'm /not/ going to
start calling my particular subset of what my distribution makes
available Gentoo/~amd64/KDE/X.org/GNU/Linux! Sure, I refer to various
subsets of that at various times as the context requires, but in general,
it's just "Linux", and I doubt that reference for it will ever change, at
least for me. As I said earlier, ask any linguist, or PR/branding person
for that matter. Linux is pretty close to the ideal name size. Plus,
it's sufficiently unique in itself to in practice disallow confusion with
other names (unlike something as generic as say "Windows"), so it's just
not going to change, at least any time soon, and when and if it does,
it'll likely be to some corruption of the term, either merged with
another (as was "Lindows", tho that's effectively history, it'll be
something else), or lazily slurred/shorted, etc ("L'ux" perhaps, or maybe
more likely "Li'x", due to related connotations, both as verbalized,
simply Lx as written).
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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