If they want to be a programmer, and only a programmer, then why are you asking ways in which they can get paid for distributing software and manuals?
Writing a manual is part of writing a software package, especially if it's one you've designed yourself. Distribution has to be done at least initially by the programmer but the aim in a "real" industry would be to make enough money to pay someone to do that for you.
If they were just a programmer, then they would be doing bespoke software
The example, which I don't think is unrealistic, is someone that is using their programming skill to produce a new product based on their own experience of what is needed. If bespoke is the only option then you are saying that there is no role for the inventive programmer or the programmer who comes from a non-programming background who knows what their previous profession needs.
because all your many customers aren't going to pay you in advance
Are they going to pay at all? An initial release might be written in one's spare time but if it never produces an income how long can work on new versions be justified? Very few people have the finances RMS has now and fewer are willing to have the lifestyle he is reported to have lead in the early days before the prizes, grants and donations started rolling in.
But at the moment people are more concerned with making money than software,
I want to write software. I have to pay the mortgage. If that's what you mean by "more concerned" then you're right but that's the way of the world.
Basically, I can see no way of making ANY money from original software where the recipient can distribute the software in exactly the same way as the author without any consideration of what that may do to the author's ability to charge other people for their time.
I also do not want to live in a world where software is distributed without source code. This logically leads to distribution with source which may be modified for internal use but not distributed. RMS and the GPL would never allow that.
Are we any nearer a solution? Of course the answer might be that it just can't be done; that the effort of creating software can never be rewarded properly while source code is avalable; that's certainly MS's opinion but they are the best argument that closed-source does too little to reward the user.
a) Dual-license it so companies who want to nick it for their own purposes and not release modifications have to sign a different agreement with you at some significant cost
The issue here is not with their modifications. If a company uses the software without paying and without modifying it what difference does it make to the programmer?
b) have a consultancy business around the product specialising in easing installations and customization (with after-installation support an optional block cost)
Installation should work without calling in a consultant; also the programmer in the scenario wishes to program, not run a consultancy business. I've done this and I can tell you that it is boring and frustrating in the extreme.
sell t-shirts, caps, charge for shipping CDs with software on
Shipping doesn't enter into it when the program makes its way to rpmfind.net; t-shirts etc. just about cover the costs of the Reg and they have more users than a Linux CAD system can dream of.
d) found a co-operative of several like-minded or related companies who want to advertise on your web-space
Advertising is a dead duck at the moment. A co-operative might have some angle but, again, it's taking time away from the product.
Look at it this way: If I were an expert carpenter making furniture that people want to use I could hire people to deal with all the non-carpentry bits of the business. With Free Software I can't because there is no revenue stream at the start with which to build up the business. I can't sell a few copies and gradually find more and more outlets, initally doing everything myself and then hireing others to let me get back to the stuff I'm good at.
As soon as a copy appears on the 'Net I'm screwed. The only choices tend to be the sort of ones you've outlined, all of which pull me further and further away from the actual thing I'm good at.
I for one am sick to death of "simple story telling". If JK can't handle a film with more than one plot-line then that's his problem, I enjoyed the complexity of the story line in Clones.
I was 12 when Star Wars came out and it's not my fault Lucas waited until I was 37 to get as far as the fifth film, so I don't want or expect the same sort of film that I did when I was 12.
Spider-Man opened on almost twice the screens AotC's did and I'll be amazed if SM makes any significent money outside the US. I've yet to meet anyone here (UK) who's interested in it despite knowing a lot of comic collectors that loved "X-Men"; it also looks awful from the trailers that have appeared in the cinemas.
Someone has come up with a way of earning a living under the following circumstances:
A lone programmer has a written a new program. Lets say it's an industrial level Cad system for Linux based on 20 years experience as an architect.
S/he releases it under the GPL but also writes a nice thick manual which is available as a PDF (let's assume s/he can't afford a minimal print run for this) to go with it.
The program works and works well and the manual is good enough to actually use the program; support is not a major issue.
The programmer continues on development of the program into new versions which are also GPL'd.
How does this programmer buy food to eat?
This is the flaw in the Free-Software model that McVoy is getting at. If you are a programmer who releases quality work which is distributed for free, how the hell do you survive?
The fact that the GPL does not prevent trying to sell software does not change the reality of distribution of such software in the Internet age.
I don't want to hear solutions based on using the software; the model here is someone who wants to be a programmer, not to remain an architect.
I believe in Free Software; I just can't see how I could ever be involved beyond it being a hobby funded by my real job.
How many CDs do you have with unplayable tracks due to such skipping?
One: a Talking Heads compilation.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is for the shiny coating layer on the back to flake off.
I'm a Blue Oyster Cult fan and when the CDs started to be issued I bought a few just after CBS was bought over by Sony. Two of the disks had Tip-Ex (corrector fluid) on the boxes and the back of the discs themselves, while Fire of Unknown Origin had little strips of black sticky tape in the same places.
Being a naturally curious sort of person I scraped the Tip-Ex off to see what it was covering, which turned out to be the old "copyright CBS" text. The disc, of course, would not play after that as the simple act of scraping off some crap on the back of the disc had worn a hole through the back plastic and the "tinfoil" underneath. I returned the discs to the shop and professed ignorance of how it had happened.
I often wonder how much it cost Sony to have all those little bits of Tip-Ex and sticky tape applied to CBS' stock when they took them over, and how long it took to do it.
There is some value to the "vinyl record ceremony" and CD's are very overpriced but perhaps not so much in the light of their longevity compared to vinyl.
All in all, I'm pretty happy in a world where I can buy either vinyl or CD
I agree, but it still winds me up when people refer to vinyl as "better".
It is a commonly held myth amongst "audiophiles" that vinyl was better sounding than CDs. Various spurious "reasons" are normally given such as harmonics which can only be achieved by pulling a diamond plough through a plastic furrow (all the damage that implies is of course ignored). Generally this argument only works when the person in question knows beforehand which of CD or vinyl they are listening to, otherwise they find it very hard indeed to tell one from the other. Even though the scratches and pops on a slightly used vinyl give it away; for some reason such tests always seem to use brand new LPs, they also tend to use £1000+ turntables.
I used to know such a person and among the ideas he had picked up from Hi-Fi mags were that it mattered which way up the mains lead went into his amp and that placing small pieces of paper (just a cornder torn off a single sheet of normal paper) under each corner of his amp would inprove the quality of the sound.
Naturally enough, it worked for him and no one else; hearing is easily swayed by what the listener expects to hear.
My brother has a large collection of vinyl LP's and singles and it takes about 10 minutes to realise that the format is inferior in almost every aspect to CDs; that's the ten minutes of listening to the care they need to be treated in just to minimise the damage caused to them by actually using them!
The basic premise of the TV series "Connections" was that no one pulls an invention completly out of their own mind, it's always based on earlier work.
In fact, Issac Newton summed it up somewhat earlier when he said "If I have seen further than others, it is through standing on the shoulders of giants" (precise wording not guaranteed, statutory rights not affected).
Americans seem convinced that Edison invented the lightbulb despite the fact that he actually set up a company to make them with the real inventor (Swan) because he couldn't break the patent and even had to give Swan joint naming credit in the company (Edison and Swan United Electric Company). It was a classic, and often repeated case of Edison trying to steal other peoples inventions or supress them (often through direct violent force with hired and armed heavies). It is a rare example of the old bastard losing, though.
These days Swan is airbrushed out of the story in the States.
Anyway, saying Mars would be covered by 500
meters of water is completely meaningless.Later in the article they say "at least" 500 meters. Personally I find that hard to believe given the height of Olympus Mons.
I've never seen rats; lots of the cute little black mice, though. I particularly remember two that appeared to be dancing one evening, though they were probably really trying to kill each other.
Fine, then throw us out. It would be nice to watch the argument about who was going to pay our share of the budget afterwards.
You're only Americans' lackeys anyway.
Obviously the EU would never, for example, copy the Americans' DCMA act just to keep American interests happy; or push for software patents at the request of American companies; or shit on third-world farmers because the Americans complained that the EU not paying slave-wages was "unfair competition" etc. etc. etc.
You're talking about the odds of any given species being intelligent. They're talking about the odds of there existing even one intelligent species out of all those millions.
Same thing, or at least closely related.
If we know, say, that there have been 10 billion species and only one has been intelligent then we can estimate the odds that, on re-running the whole story, none, one, or more species would hit the jackpot in the same time based on the result that each species has one in 10 billion chance of being intelligent.
Like I say, it would be an estimate and pehaps we were very lucky and the odds are actually one in a trillion per species. But until we find some other intelligent life it's all we have to go on.
N: That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Spiritual consolation needn't rely on such a quasi-solopsist perspective as "the universe was made for our benefit." anymore than professional compensation need rely on the idea that the companies compensating us were made for our benefit.
But the fact that evolution can not offer spiritual consolation is irrelevant unless one pre-supposes that it should have some such. Otherwise it is like criticising a chair for not being able to speak. Worse, since a chair has some purpose and a maker who can at least be appealed to for a "better" chair design while evolution is simply a grand tautology: "Living things are those which have survived" with no more depth to it than that and no designer to petition for an improved evolution with added spiritual consolation.
As to the other points, Occam's razor applies; since there is no evidence to indicate that there is a higher purpose, a spiritual aspect to the universe, or that it is not indifferent to our suffering the burden of proof is on those that would say otherwise. Just as I don't feel any need to prove that Santa Claus does not exist - if you say he does then I'm all ears for the evidence.
He depicts evolution as something that
can't possibly reflect a higher purpose,
It doesn't and it can't.
and thus can't provide the sort of
spiritual consolation most people are after.
That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our
suffering."
Which is patently obvious to any intelligent or observant person that's lived in the universe for any length of time.
If you replayed
evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart
as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small."
We know that to be true by the simple fact that it's only happened once in all the species that have existed. In all those millions of "rolls of the dice" the result has only come up once. It follows that it MUST be rare.
The difficulty is defining "obviously". I maintain that computers lose in the mid game despite being at an advantage in the end game. I've written three chess programs and that's my experience, backed up by watching humans beating or being beat by chess programs.
The end game is tactics, mid game is strategy and chess programs suck at strategy.
Well it's not my problem that you're fucking ignorant. RMS has only been saying that for more than a decade now, and he's had his damn manifesto flying around the Internet for longer than we've had the WWW. Everybody who has bothered to listen to him - as opposed to ignoring him and then insulting him - has figured out what GNU meant.
This is fatuous. To quote RMS's announcement of GNU:
"To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to
write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker,
assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text
formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of
other things."
No mention of X and not only is TeX not mentioned but he specifically says that a text formatter will be added. It is clearly implied that all these will be created by the GNU people rather than being "off the shelf".
There is a revison of this history on gnu.org but it's clearly post-facto justification.
It's not like RMS is the only one doing it.
This is where you lost it! You are now justifying RMS's (quite reasonable) decision to not give name-level credit to other parties, because it's normal practice, as part of your argument that Linux should give name-level credit to GNU. Tell me, does someone come in to do your typing for you?
But RMS does honour Linux in the name of his system. Before Linux he was calling it The GNU System. In light of the contribution of a kernel - a single piece of the entire puzzle - he renamed his system to The GNU/Linux System.
No. Once again reality is just a word on the screen for you. to quote RMS again:
Variants of the GNU operating system, which use the
kernel Linux, are now widely used; though these systems are often
referred to as ``Linux'', they are more accurately called GNU/Linux systems.
There is no hint here that GNU has been renamed, it states that GNU/Linux is just a varient of GNU. This quote is from the front of gnu.org and contains a link to another load of wank about how Stallman defines an OS to be an arbitary set of programs, oh, and a "kernel". The GNU set of programs is arbitary, although generally well chosen (not surprising when the designers of Unix spent so much time on the issue). But others can be put together.
This is because they are applications running under the OS.This is because they are applications running under the OS.This is because they are applications running under the OS.This is because they are applications running under the OS.. Do you understand? I doubt it.
What he does say it that systems that are simply The GNU System + the Linux kernel should be called "The GNU System" or "The GNU/Linux System".
And when they're not "simply GNU+Linux", as is the case with almost all Linux distributions these days, what then? "Potential GNU/Linux system" perhaps?
So why does Linux get the big name and GNU doesn't even get a mention?
Because it's the bloody OS. Who names an OS after the programs that run on it?
The analogy is simple. RMS built an entire city.
The analogy is simple, RMS made bricks and trucks and scaffolding. Linus made a powerplant and he and others used GNU bricks and tools (and others) to build a city and now RMS wants the place to be called "Brick City". Bricks are important but its generally accepted that cities are named by the people that put the bricks together to form something useful.
Renaming the GNU system to something else is the only real disrespect here
It would be if anyone was doing it; RMS wants Linux to be renamed.
In the time I've been on Slashdot I have never run across such a pathetic, childish, sycophantic, and damn-well stupid argument as the one you have tried to put across in your two posts. You have added nothing whatsoever to the strength of RMS's case and have in fact only made it seem all the more messianic and arrogant.
People like you should get out of software and let others get on with fighting the patents and MS of the world. If your brand of mindless, baseless, pointless fighting about issues such as this is allowed to continue the whole of the free software movement will fracture and be picked off a piece at a time.
There is a lot of talk about how RealNames were actually providing a useful service in countries with non-latin character sets as the DNS does not support them.
How true is this and does anyone have an alternative solution that has any chance of catching on?
Is it? It must be nice for the XFree people to have been so blessed.
He was already calling XFree86 + GCC + TeX by the name "The GNU System" and nobody complained about that.
How many people knew that's what he meant? I've certainly never thought he was including other people's work in the term "GNU".
Stallman recognised the huge contribution that the Linux kernel provided to the GNU system and graciously called it the GNU/Linux
Gosh, that's big of him. Actually choosing to name someone else's project in such a generous way.
So what you're saying is that it's okay for RMS to name any project in any way he sees fit. In the case of GNU it was okay to not give any "name credit" to the other components, but in Linux's case it's wrong; both decisions are just laid down by fiat from the almighty hand of Stallman.
The incredible irony is that Stallman should have just called GNU + Linux by the common name "The GNU System".
What breathtaking arrogance! What the fuck does it have to do with Stallman what Linus, or anyone else, calls their project?
I get the impression that the people who insult RMS - like you - simply don't understand what he's saying
Well, you've got the wrong impression then. I understand and agree with 90% of what Stallman says about free software. I also think he says it, and a lot of other things, in a way which divides the community of programmers and is increasingly being counter productive by unrestrained ranting about fringe issues. If he doesn't stop this sort of moronic raving about Linux he's going to undermine the whole free-software movement.
Who wants to write software and then be told they have to change the name of it because they used GNU tools to write it? That sort of ego-trip is something we can all do without.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing a manual is part of writing a software package, especially if it's one you've designed yourself. Distribution has to be done at least initially by the programmer but the aim in a "real" industry would be to make enough money to pay someone to do that for you.
If they were just a programmer, then they would be doing bespoke software
The example, which I don't think is unrealistic, is someone that is using their programming skill to produce a new product based on their own experience of what is needed. If bespoke is the only option then you are saying that there is no role for the inventive programmer or the programmer who comes from a non-programming background who knows what their previous profession needs.
because all your many customers aren't going to pay you in advance
Are they going to pay at all? An initial release might be written in one's spare time but if it never produces an income how long can work on new versions be justified? Very few people have the finances RMS has now and fewer are willing to have the lifestyle he is reported to have lead in the early days before the prizes, grants and donations started rolling in.
But at the moment people are more concerned with making money than software,
I want to write software. I have to pay the mortgage. If that's what you mean by "more concerned" then you're right but that's the way of the world.
Basically, I can see no way of making ANY money from original software where the recipient can distribute the software in exactly the same way as the author without any consideration of what that may do to the author's ability to charge other people for their time.
I also do not want to live in a world where software is distributed without source code. This logically leads to distribution with source which may be modified for internal use but not distributed. RMS and the GPL would never allow that.
Are we any nearer a solution? Of course the answer might be that it just can't be done; that the effort of creating software can never be rewarded properly while source code is avalable; that's certainly MS's opinion but they are the best argument that closed-source does too little to reward the user.
TWW
The issue here is not with their modifications. If a company uses the software without paying and without modifying it what difference does it make to the programmer?
b) have a consultancy business around the product specialising in easing installations and customization (with after-installation support an optional block cost)
Installation should work without calling in a consultant; also the programmer in the scenario wishes to program, not run a consultancy business. I've done this and I can tell you that it is boring and frustrating in the extreme.
sell t-shirts, caps, charge for shipping CDs with software on
Shipping doesn't enter into it when the program makes its way to rpmfind.net; t-shirts etc. just about cover the costs of the Reg and they have more users than a Linux CAD system can dream of.
d) found a co-operative of several like-minded or related companies who want to advertise on your web-space
Advertising is a dead duck at the moment. A co-operative might have some angle but, again, it's taking time away from the product.
Look at it this way: If I were an expert carpenter making furniture that people want to use I could hire people to deal with all the non-carpentry bits of the business. With Free Software I can't because there is no revenue stream at the start with which to build up the business. I can't sell a few copies and gradually find more and more outlets, initally doing everything myself and then hireing others to let me get back to the stuff I'm good at.
As soon as a copy appears on the 'Net I'm screwed. The only choices tend to be the sort of ones you've outlined, all of which pull me further and further away from the actual thing I'm good at.
TWW
I was 12 when Star Wars came out and it's not my fault Lucas waited until I was 37 to get as far as the fifth film, so I don't want or expect the same sort of film that I did when I was 12.
TWW
TWW
How does this programmer buy food to eat?
This is the flaw in the Free-Software model that McVoy is getting at. If you are a programmer who releases quality work which is distributed for free, how the hell do you survive?
The fact that the GPL does not prevent trying to sell software does not change the reality of distribution of such software in the Internet age.
I don't want to hear solutions based on using the software; the model here is someone who wants to be a programmer, not to remain an architect.
I believe in Free Software; I just can't see how I could ever be involved beyond it being a hobby funded by my real job.
TWW
One: a Talking Heads compilation.
Don't even get me started on how easy it is for the shiny coating layer on the back to flake off.
I'm a Blue Oyster Cult fan and when the CDs started to be issued I bought a few just after CBS was bought over by Sony. Two of the disks had Tip-Ex (corrector fluid) on the boxes and the back of the discs themselves, while Fire of Unknown Origin had little strips of black sticky tape in the same places.
Being a naturally curious sort of person I scraped the Tip-Ex off to see what it was covering, which turned out to be the old "copyright CBS" text. The disc, of course, would not play after that as the simple act of scraping off some crap on the back of the disc had worn a hole through the back plastic and the "tinfoil" underneath. I returned the discs to the shop and professed ignorance of how it had happened.
I often wonder how much it cost Sony to have all those little bits of Tip-Ex and sticky tape applied to CBS' stock when they took them over, and how long it took to do it.
TWW
All in all, I'm pretty happy in a world where I can buy either vinyl or CD
I agree, but it still winds me up when people refer to vinyl as "better".
TWW
I used to know such a person and among the ideas he had picked up from Hi-Fi mags were that it mattered which way up the mains lead went into his amp and that placing small pieces of paper (just a cornder torn off a single sheet of normal paper) under each corner of his amp would inprove the quality of the sound.
Naturally enough, it worked for him and no one else; hearing is easily swayed by what the listener expects to hear.
My brother has a large collection of vinyl LP's and singles and it takes about 10 minutes to realise that the format is inferior in almost every aspect to CDs; that's the ten minutes of listening to the care they need to be treated in just to minimise the damage caused to them by actually using them!
TWW
So, not a fan of Paine or Swift, I take it?
TWW
In fact, Issac Newton summed it up somewhat earlier when he said "If I have seen further than others, it is through standing on the shoulders of giants" (precise wording not guaranteed, statutory rights not affected).
TWW
These days Swan is airbrushed out of the story in the States.
TWW
Well, it's not for sale, so let's not undersell it either!
TWW
TWW
TWW
I've never seen rats; lots of the cute little black mice, though. I particularly remember two that appeared to be dancing one evening, though they were probably really trying to kill each other.
TWW
Fine, then throw us out. It would be nice to watch the argument about who was going to pay our share of the budget afterwards.
You're only Americans' lackeys anyway.
Obviously the EU would never, for example, copy the Americans' DCMA act just to keep American interests happy; or push for software patents at the request of American companies; or shit on third-world farmers because the Americans complained that the EU not paying slave-wages was "unfair competition" etc. etc. etc.
TWW
It's just off the coast, in fact.
TWW
Funny, I thought it was in the UK. Ohh, little bit of politics...
TWW
Same thing, or at least closely related.
If we know, say, that there have been 10 billion species and only one has been intelligent then we can estimate the odds that, on re-running the whole story, none, one, or more species would hit the jackpot in the same time based on the result that each species has one in 10 billion chance of being intelligent.
Like I say, it would be an estimate and pehaps we were very lucky and the odds are actually one in a trillion per species. But until we find some other intelligent life it's all we have to go on.
N: That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Spiritual consolation needn't rely on such a quasi-solopsist perspective as "the universe was made for our benefit." anymore than professional compensation need rely on the idea that the companies compensating us were made for our benefit.
But the fact that evolution can not offer spiritual consolation is irrelevant unless one pre-supposes that it should have some such. Otherwise it is like criticising a chair for not being able to speak. Worse, since a chair has some purpose and a maker who can at least be appealed to for a "better" chair design while evolution is simply a grand tautology: "Living things are those which have survived" with no more depth to it than that and no designer to petition for an improved evolution with added spiritual consolation.
As to the other points, Occam's razor applies; since there is no evidence to indicate that there is a higher purpose, a spiritual aspect to the universe, or that it is not indifferent to our suffering the burden of proof is on those that would say otherwise. Just as I don't feel any need to prove that Santa Claus does not exist - if you say he does then I'm all ears for the evidence.
It doesn't and it can't.
and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after.
That's their problem, since the universe was not made for our benefit. Wishing doesn't make it so.
we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."
Which is patently obvious to any intelligent or observant person that's lived in the universe for any length of time.
If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small."
We know that to be true by the simple fact that it's only happened once in all the species that have existed. In all those millions of "rolls of the dice" the result has only come up once. It follows that it MUST be rare.
TWW
The end game is tactics, mid game is strategy and chess programs suck at strategy.
TWW
This is fatuous. To quote RMS's announcement of GNU:
No mention of X and not only is TeX not mentioned but he specifically says that a text formatter will be added. It is clearly implied that all these will be created by the GNU people rather than being "off the shelf".
There is a revison of this history on gnu.org but it's clearly post-facto justification.
It's not like RMS is the only one doing it.
This is where you lost it! You are now justifying RMS's (quite reasonable) decision to not give name-level credit to other parties, because it's normal practice, as part of your argument that Linux should give name-level credit to GNU. Tell me, does someone come in to do your typing for you?
But RMS does honour Linux in the name of his system. Before Linux he was calling it The GNU System. In light of the contribution of a kernel - a single piece of the entire puzzle - he renamed his system to The GNU/Linux System.
No. Once again reality is just a word on the screen for you. to quote RMS again:
There is no hint here that GNU has been renamed, it states that GNU/Linux is just a varient of GNU. This quote is from the front of gnu.org and contains a link to another load of wank about how Stallman defines an OS to be an arbitary set of programs, oh, and a "kernel". The GNU set of programs is arbitary, although generally well chosen (not surprising when the designers of Unix spent so much time on the issue). But others can be put together.
This is because they are applications running under the OS.This is because they are applications running under the OS. This is because they are applications running under the OS. This is because they are applications running under the OS. . Do you understand? I doubt it.
What he does say it that systems that are simply The GNU System + the Linux kernel should be called "The GNU System" or "The GNU/Linux System".
And when they're not "simply GNU+Linux", as is the case with almost all Linux distributions these days, what then? "Potential GNU/Linux system" perhaps?
So why does Linux get the big name and GNU doesn't even get a mention?
Because it's the bloody OS. Who names an OS after the programs that run on it?
The analogy is simple. RMS built an entire city.
The analogy is simple, RMS made bricks and trucks and scaffolding. Linus made a powerplant and he and others used GNU bricks and tools (and others) to build a city and now RMS wants the place to be called "Brick City". Bricks are important but its generally accepted that cities are named by the people that put the bricks together to form something useful.
Renaming the GNU system to something else is the only real disrespect here
It would be if anyone was doing it; RMS wants Linux to be renamed.
In the time I've been on Slashdot I have never run across such a pathetic, childish, sycophantic, and damn-well stupid argument as the one you have tried to put across in your two posts. You have added nothing whatsoever to the strength of RMS's case and have in fact only made it seem all the more messianic and arrogant.
People like you should get out of software and let others get on with fighting the patents and MS of the world. If your brand of mindless, baseless, pointless fighting about issues such as this is allowed to continue the whole of the free software movement will fracture and be picked off a piece at a time.
In short: go away, you're not needed here.
TWW
How true is this and does anyone have an alternative solution that has any chance of catching on?
TWW
In the UK this is just writing "copyright " on the item.
What is the formal procedure in the US?
TWW
Is it? It must be nice for the XFree people to have been so blessed.
He was already calling XFree86 + GCC + TeX by the name "The GNU System" and nobody complained about that.
How many people knew that's what he meant? I've certainly never thought he was including other people's work in the term "GNU".
Stallman recognised the huge contribution that the Linux kernel provided to the GNU system and graciously called it the GNU/Linux
Gosh, that's big of him. Actually choosing to name someone else's project in such a generous way.
So what you're saying is that it's okay for RMS to name any project in any way he sees fit. In the case of GNU it was okay to not give any "name credit" to the other components, but in Linux's case it's wrong; both decisions are just laid down by fiat from the almighty hand of Stallman.
The incredible irony is that Stallman should have just called GNU + Linux by the common name "The GNU System".
What breathtaking arrogance! What the fuck does it have to do with Stallman what Linus, or anyone else, calls their project?
I get the impression that the people who insult RMS - like you - simply don't understand what he's saying
Well, you've got the wrong impression then. I understand and agree with 90% of what Stallman says about free software. I also think he says it, and a lot of other things, in a way which divides the community of programmers and is increasingly being counter productive by unrestrained ranting about fringe issues. If he doesn't stop this sort of moronic raving about Linux he's going to undermine the whole free-software movement.
Who wants to write software and then be told they have to change the name of it because they used GNU tools to write it? That sort of ego-trip is something we can all do without.
ingrates like you don't make it any easier
Sycophants like you aren't much help to anyone.
TWW