Slashdot Mirror

I've been hearing about the 'decline of Windows' for years now. Heck, I'm only 24, and I'm already sick of it...

I ran Linux for the first time when I was 14, it's been *ten years*. For ten years now, I've been coming to websites and reading about how Windows sucks and how it's falling apart and now the newest Windows OS is a flop and how Microsoft is an Evil Monopoly.

I wonder, is it the same people, who CONSTANTLY predict the fall of MS? If so, do you ever stop and say 'Gee, maybe I was a little...over dramatic 10 years ago...?'. Or maybe, there is just a constant influx of new people to call upon the fall of Windows? really, I'm not sure.

I'm not saying other OS'es haven't come along way since I was 14; but I'm just sick of hearing the same old tired crap. Here's exactly what I mean - some article from 1998 blabbing about how great Linux is going to be: http://www.ties.org/deven/predictions.html

At the time, PLENTY of people would have agreed, especially the typical slashdot'ers. And yet, here we are, Windows is still the desktop king, MS is still going strong, and people are still predicting the fall. At what point can I finally say 'Haha! See, you were wrong?'. If I bookmark this comment, how many years do I have to wait until I can come back and say 'See, you were wrong?'

Of course, in 10 years, nobody will care about this (hell, in a week, nobody will care about this) and if I were to post a link to it into a new 'MS IS GONNA FALL' thread - everyone would say 'Umm, but it's 10 years old; and MS is REALLY going to fall this time...because of ______ and ______.'

Does anyone know if there are implementations of NeWS available as open source now? Has anyone working on one of the "X Is Icky - I have a Better Way" window systems looked at NeWS for a model? Enquiring minds (however enfeebled) want to know.

Back in May 2000 (longer ago that I thought), I looked into this. I didn't really find any good clones of NeWS, but I was wondering whether Sun might consider open-sourcing NeWS since it had long since lost all commercial viability.

I ended up contacting James Gosling at Sun, who was the original author of both NeWS and Java, to ask him whether it might be possible for Sun to open the old source code to NeWS. His response was that he had already tried to make it happen several years before, but the source code was lost! Apparently the only source they could find was the NeWS 2.0 bastardized combination of X11, NeWS and Adobe's Display PostScript. The source to the original clean NeWS 1.1 release was nowhere to be found!

After a couple weeks of research, and asking a number of people, I found some leads on a couple places that might have had copies of the NeWS 1.1 source code (there were a few sources licensees around), so maybe it could have been repatriated back to Sun. The source may not be "lost to the ages" entirely after all.

Unfortunately, it seemed that James Gosling had by this time lost interest in pushing for NeWS to be released as open source, because he feels the world has moved on and PostScript is no longer the approach he would favor for a GUI system. While he's not opposed to the idea, it takes someone pushing internally to make it happen, because it takes time and effort to scrub the code for release, get approvals from executives and lawyers, etc.

Perhaps if enough people would take an interest in lobbying Sun for the release of the source, NeWS itself (the real thing) could potentially be released as open source someday, assuming the source can be recovered. If anyone is interested, please feel free to email me about it.

Alternatively, I have to wonder how much of the functionality of NeWS already exists in Ghostscript. Perhaps it would be feasible to adapt Ghostscript into a NeWS clone, and it probably has better rendering code than NeWS did. It might be an interesting project, though perhaps a daunting one...

If you're going to "out" someone by posting their email address for spammers to harvest, you ought to post your own email address at the same time so you can both "share the love" with all that lovely spam. (And yes, my real email address is deven@ties.org -- I never hide my email address as a matter of policy, even on Slashdot...)

True, but then Linux is not even an operating system, it's the kernel. The entire operating system is really GNU/Linux (or maybe not). Clear as mud?

Google stores user preferences for you to specify default search parameters. For this to work, the cookie is needed to associate you with your preferences, whether the preferences are in their database or directly encoded in the cookie. Do you have solid evidence that they're also doing something more nefarious like building a personal dossier of all your searches? If you've got proof, put it on the table. Otherwise, you're getting paranoid; you may need to adjust your tin-foil hat...

As for PageRank, it may not be perfect, but it works really well. Yes, it may miss a good, relevant site. Nobody's perfect. If a poorly-ranked site is really valuable, people will probably start linking to it to help find that valuable information, and it will rise in the rankings.

If you really think you can improve their search results, why don't you make concrete suggestions to Google, or apply for a job with them? Everything I've seen about Google convinces me that they're devoted to constantly improving the quality of their search results. If you've really got a way to improve it, I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear it.

PageRank may not be the be-all and end-all, but it's based on solid principles of library science, and librarians were dealing with these needle-in-a-haystack problems long before the Internet was invented. (By Al Gore, of course!)

I disagree that starting a new website dooms you to PageRank obscurity. I created a new website at the very end of November 2001 for an open-source project I released. My website is at www.gangplank.org, and I also created a Freshmeat page for it. Freshmeat is probably ranked highly, since it provides excellent information. In any event, a simple search for "gangplank" right now places my site at #3, which is plenty good enough. Today, if I search for "deven" alone, my home page comes up as the #1 entry. (It's been in the top 10 as long as I can remember.) That page has been there for years, but never promoted on a site like Freshmeat.

I agree that there's a barrier to entry into the parthenon of ranking pages. To a certain degree, it's a "good old boys' network" of the "in" web pages. But that set of "in" pages is enormous, and if your site really is where people want to go, it often finds its way near the top of the list sooner or later.

However, there's a very good reason why ranking pages count more than "worthless" ones. If all pages were "democratically" given equal "voting power", all you'd see would be webmasters creating thousands upon thousands of junk pages with thousands of links to their site to try to claim the top ranking. (Much as you used to see miles of keywords hidden in web pages to fool content-oriented search engines.) As long as search engines are so important, there will always be people trying to subvert them to show their sites, no matter what site the user might really want. Google's PageRank is more resistant to tampering than most.

Google has also demonstrated utmost integrity in all their actions. In an age of increasingly despicable behavior from every corporation in search of a quick buck, this is quite refreshing. Google never succumbed to the Portal trap, nor graphic banner ad foolishness, nor paid search result rankings, etc. They've avoided all the heinous tendencies we've come to expect from most corporations, and steadfastly pursued their mission of making information on the Internet more accessible.

They've created one excellent service after another, from their original Web search (still the best by far), to Usenet (saving the Deja News archive from destruction, I might add, after Deja succumbed to Portal and other heinous corporate foolishness), to Image search, to Catalog search, to News summary and search, etc.

f you think you can do better, then do it. Many users (including myself) switched to Google for their excellent relevance rankings long before they had 2 billion pages indexed. I think Google had only about 100,000 pages indexed (still as a beta at Stanford) when I started checking it first instead of Altavista. (And it wasn't long before I stopped bothering with the second search on Altavista.) If you can do better than Google, maybe you can take the crown of most popular search engine away from Google. You suggest that PageRank is Google's Achille's heel. So prove it by making something better. But good luck! Google's pretty damn good at what they do. I won't hold my breath.

Google has brilliant people who provide outstanding (and astonishingly fast and powerful) services for free to all comers, they have effective yet nonintrusive and nondeceptive advertising, and they even manage to turn a profit, unlike most Internet startups. They should not hold an IPO, and the government should stay out of it. Google has proven itself, and impeding the Google juggernaut would impoverish us all. Google has always done the right thing, and they've done it better than anyone could hope, much less ask. In my book, Google ranks right up at the top of the list for coolest companies ever.

Yes, Google is beloved, but that loyalty was earned, fair and square.

I remember using SunView/SunWindows on a Sun 3/50 before NeWS came out. Slow hardware, yet it was VERY snappy. I used NeWS for as long as I had it available to me, but eventually I ended up using X11 by default. NeWS was quite a bit slower than SunView, but I didn't find it unacceptably slow. Today's machines are so fast that I can't imagine it would feel slow at all on a current system. (Porting it to run under Linux on an x86 system might take some effort, though.)

Even at the time (1988?), I wished that Sun would distribute NeWS as freely (source and binary) as X11 was, and I was sure that the difference in licensing would doom NeWS to an early demise. I wish I had been wrong about that one, but NeWS died much as I expected. I've always wanted to be able to go back to using NeWS, but without the code, it would require reimplementation of a clone. Even with Ghostscript available, that was a daunting project to consider, though I know that I'm not the only one who contemplated it.

Maybe we should take the hint and try to organize a group that would be willing to pick up NeWS and maintain it. I'll take a shot at coordinating such an effort. Anyone who is interested in seeing NeWS released, who would be willing to help maintain it (if we can get Sun to release it), please email me about it. Please be sure to include the word "NeWS" (in mixed case like that) somewhere in the Subject line, so my mail filter can catch the messages before they end up in a spam-catching folder!

Somehow I doubt RMS sees the irony. I wrote a short piece about this back on March 31, 1999: Why "GNU/Linux" is a Misnomer In the 2.5 years since then, the FSF still has not released a GNU distribution, relying instead on the Debian project to do what they won't.

Given that "The GNU Project" doesn't credit the X Window System anywhere in its name, RMS has no moral high ground to stand on when he demands that all Linux-based systems be referred to as "GNU/Linux" systems.

It's doubly ironic that the older BSD license was incompatible with the GPL specifically because of the so-called "advertising clause" that requires credit be given for the BSD-licensed software.

Isn't it funny how RMS feels it isn't necessary to credit BSD or X Windows, yet demands such credit for the GNU project? It's disingenuous hypocrisy, through and through. If someone makes a free software distribution, they should be able to call it anything they want, whether "GNU", "Linux", "BSD" or anything else is included in the name.

After all, wasn't this all supposed to be about freedom? I guess that doesn't include the freedom to choose the name...

[I wrote this back on March 31, 1999, but it's just as true today as it was then...]

Why "GNU/Linux" is a Misnomer

There is no GNU/Linux distribution.

The only appropriate use of the term "GNU/Linux" would be for a Linux distribution released under the auspices of the GNU project. Since no such distribution actually exists, the term "GNU/Linux" is a complete misnomer.

Sorry, an FTP archive does not a distribution make. If it did, no distribution maker would get any attention, since everyone would go to the FTP archives and get everything from the source. In real life, nobody wants to do that to create a complete system, and most people lack the skills and determination to bootstrap a system entirely from scratch this way. (And for those who do, their systems might be most accurately described as "custom Unix-like systems", although they would more likely be described as "custom Linux systems" now.)

The avowed goal of the GNU project is to create a complete system which is like Unix, but not proprietary. The packaging of a distribution is an essential part of creating a complete system. Without a distribution, you don't have a complete system; it is just as important as the kernel itself. A complete system must form a cohesive whole. To point at a jumble of diverse components and describe them as a "complete system" is delusional at best. All of Stallman's prevarications aside, the kernel was not the "last piece" missing from "the GNU system". (If this were true, why didn't the GNU project release "GNU/Linux" immediately when the Linux kernel became available?)

The GNU project has yet to produce a complete system. If and when the GNU project releases a distribution of the GNU operating system based on the Linux kernel, it will be fully appropriate to call that distribution "GNU/Linux". Similarly, a GNU distribution based on the Hurd kernel would be appropriate to name "GNU/Hurd".

The GNU project has no right to dictate the choice of names for distributions made by others. Given how obsessed RMS is with issues of freedom, it is quite ironic that he doesn't afford distribution makers the freedom to name their distributions, or the marketplace the freedom to choose generic names.

Linux distribution makers have chosen to use the term "Linux" in all their distribution names for name recognition reasons. This was not done to unfairly bestow credit on the Linux kernel out of proportion to its contribution to the entire system, as RMS appears to believe. Rather, this is entirely an issue of marketing for the complete distribution.

Whether RMS likes it or not, "Linux" is a more marketable name than "GNU" is. This is partly because RMS cares more about adherence to his ideals than appeasing the market. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.) This is partly because the recursive nature of the "GNU's Not Unix" acronym isn't very appealing to the general public, being both confusing and rather "cutesy" at the same time.

Mostly,"Linux" wins from a marketing perspective simply because it is very reminiscent of "Unix", itself a bizarre name that nonetheless carries considerable name recognition in the marketplace, due to the distinguished record acquired by Unix systems of all flavors over the years. Since Linux is "Unix-like", this is a good and appropriate connotation, as well as being marketable. Marketing is about perception, not fairness.

It is disingenuous in the extreme for RMS to insist that all Linux distributions should be referred to as "GNU/Linux". By doing so, RMS manages to present himself as childish and petulant, eroding much of the credibility he had built up through years of dedication and hard work. It reinforces the image of an inflexible zealot, which encourages people to discount his contributions rather than acknowledging them.

Yes, the GNU tools form an essential piece of a typical Linux distribution. The Linux kernel itself is essential. The X Windows system is essential. BSD-derived code is essential. The packaging of the distribution itself is essential. Many components of the system are essential, and none of that matters when it comes to the name.

The name of a distribution is the exclusive perogative of its creator. Just as Linus Torvalds has the perogative of naming the Linux kernel despite his admission that most of the lines of code come from contributions, so does Red Hat have the perogative of naming their distribution "Red Hat Linux", regardless of where the greatest contribution may lie.

RMS has no cause to complain. X Windows is not credited in the GNU name because it has been "adopted" by the GNU project, and is therefore considered to be implicitly credited. In fact, the GNU project "adopted" as many components as possible, and only rewrote what was necessary to fill in the gaps.

What RMS has willfully ignored is that most Linux distributions have "adopted" many GNU components to fill in the gaps to create a complete system, exactly as the GNU project "adopted" what was already available. By the same logic, the GNU project is implicitly credited, as is X Windows. The choice of a name for the overall distribution remains strictly a marketing decision, not a recognition of credit due or most significant contributor.

The upshot of all this? The term Linux distribution (or simply Linux) is entirely appropriate to refer to generic distributions based on Linux. Not because of the relative importance of the kernel to the overall system, but because "Linux" is the only term common in the names of all Linux distributions. Therefore, it is the most appropriate generic designation, and "GNU/Linux" is the misnomer that should be suppressed.

Copyright 1999 by Deven T. Corzine. <deven@ties.org>

GNU/Linux is a misnomer

Furthermore, requesting credit in a title is unreasonable. Linus himself said it best with, "Your midwife doesn't select the name of your babies." Could Linux have been built without GNU tools? Possible but unlikely. That does not, however, grant Mr. Stallman the right to name it.