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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