Re: [gentoo-dev] Dist name...

[Jean-Michel Smith]

On Monday 05 August 2002 08:06 pm, Gregg wrote:
> Not attempting to sound rude in any way, but I beleive my best response to
> this is; take your holy war somewhere else?

I agree.  The official stance should IMHO be that there are two 'official' 
names: Gentoo Linux and Gentoo GNU/Linux, and each user and developer is free 
to use the one they like the best.

This would especially be useful for people like me, who try to remember to say 
GNU/Linux out of respect for RMS's contribution, but often don't remember to. 
;-)

> This battle and the vi vs. emacs battle, they all just make me sick.

Well, it is a little more relevant than emacs v. vi.  Richard Stallman has 
requested that people refer to the entire software suite (all of the GNU 
tools plus the Linux kernel) as GNU/Linux rather than Linux, not so much to 
give his team credit (though they do deserve a great deal of credit, having 
written something like 90% of the core operating system), but to emphesize 
that there is a philosophy of freedom behind much of the source code that the 
FSF represents and promotes, whereas the more apolitical groups don't.

Having said all that, I think RMS is emphesizing that point a little too much, 
though, since as often as not discussions like this tend to touch on the 
concept of freedom he is trying to promote, mayble I'm wrong about that.

In any event, I agree that the argument doesn't belong here, which is why I 
suggest the dual naming convention.  Hell, we license enough software under 
dual licenses to make the licenses compatible, why not dual name the distro 
to make the naming conventions compatible. :-)

Anyway, Linux or GNU/Linux, by any name, still represents Software Freedom and 
Software Excellence to most of us, and that is what really counts IMHO.

Jean.