[Pan-users] OT: GNU/Linux Was: clearing headers?

[Duncan]

Yavor Doganov <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, 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