Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 28 Dec 1998 10:40:04 -0800 | From | (Jim Gettys) | Subject | Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux |
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> From: "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@kf8nh.apk.net> > Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1998 14:21:10 -0500 > To: jg@pa.dec.com (Jim Gettys) > Cc: rms@gnu.org, fizban@tin.it, linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu > Subject: Re: Article: IBM wants to "clean up the license" of Linux > ----- > In message <9812241858.AA08392@pachyderm.pa.dec.com>, Jim Gettys writes: > +----- > | > From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> > | > > | > The system version most of us are using is the combination of Linux > | > and the GNU system. "GNU/Linux" is a good way to describe that > | > combination, and when I write that, it always means the whole > | > combination. The kernel is simply Linux. > | > | One might as well also say that the whole system should be called > | "GNU/X/Linux"; the X Window system contribution, in terms of number of > | lines of code of software, is very large. People should remember that > +--->8 > > And many of Linux's user-space networking utilities (and some significant > chunks of the kernel --- not to mention at least one SCSI driver and > probably other drivers) come from our colleagues in BSD development. And > then there's the Samba folks, etc. If we must name the system to > acknowledge all the contributing projects, we're going to end up with a > decidedly Entish name. :-)
I'm not one to worry too much about names (though binding the free variable is a sin I will be guilty of forever :-().
I did not mean to slight the BSD folks in the slightest. I had meant to raise that as well in my earlier mail (but blew it). Their contributions are also very large, and relative size of code bases have little to do with importance (though Microsoft thought windowing important enough to name their whole system after it...; I for one don't believe everything belongs in a single sink....)
I know I'm happy that X is part of Linux, Digital UNIX, Solaris, *BSD, etc; what it is called on the outside of the box is pretty much irrelevant to me. It isn't that I wouldn't enjoy such visible acknowledgement, or others who also contributed to X wouldn't enjoy such acknowlegement, but that it just hasn't worked out that way. What I care about (and when it comes down to it, I believe RMS does too) is that it is affecting millions of people's lives now, and growing again very fast, and that therefore another generation of contributors is growing up into software that they can get their hands on and work on themseves.
It doesn't matter at this date whether Linux is the right name, the wrong name, or a piece of the right name. It is a simple, catchy name, in wide spread vernacular use, applied to the confluence of technologies which include the Linux kernel, the X Window System, GNU software, BSD software, and lots of other contributions, of thousands of people.
As it is, we have to deal with Red Hat Linux, Caldera Linux, SuSE Linux, etc; this is confusion enough. Somehow I don't think that "Red Hat GNU/X/BSD/Linux" would make it in the marketplace. And you can't take one without the other for a general purpose system, and have a usable system (each of the components by themselves have other large uses, of course).
My point is simple:
IT IS TOO LATE TO CHANGE THE NAME IN COMMON USAGE, whether we think it wise or not. By the time Bob Scheifler and I realized that the X Window System was the wrong name for X, it was too late. IT IS NOW TOO LATE TO CHANGE LINUX's name, given it is now in all over the press. All the discussion in the world is pointless. None of the alternatives proposed have any significant merit, and certainly can't be pronounced in common speech. Even if there were a catchy replacement at hand, it would be too late, given all the press of this year. All a name change would do is confuse alot of people just now, for the first time, realizing there might be a different way to get their software, and make some group of contributors feel left out, who sweat blood on their work, usually for little monetary reward.
So instead of wasting further time and bandwidth on this discussion, I admonish all who have contributed to "open source" effort to spend their cycles and bandwidth giving credit to others, rather than worring about how to get credit to themselves. There is more than enough credit to go around, and if we all acknowledge the others contributions, I expect everyone will end up happy; the current path is one on which everyone ends up unhappy.
End of sermon. - Jim Gettys
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