I don't see the name of a project as something designed to give credit to various groups or individuals. And certainly, the name of a project is not designed to be an entire forum for political/philosophical discussion -- something the GNU project seems to have turned it into. Linux is a convinient and easy moniker, and I'm sticking with it.
Re:Greetings from VA Linux / Andover.net!
on
Linus Interview
·
· Score: 1
Before people start flaming away, please note that this is clearly meant to be a satire, and not an actualy post from VA Linux.
Note: 1. The use of Slash-dot instead of Slashdot 2. The use of Captain Taco instead of Commander Taco. 3. The statement that in "90% of cases" Rob will retain editorial control.
Based on the comments I've actually seen, the vast majority of Linux users aren't particularly worried about Redhat achieving monopoly (or near-monopoly) power within the Linux market. There are two reasons: 1. Redhat releases almost all of their products under the GPL, and releases all their "core" products under the GPL (ie libraries, rpm software, etc. as opposed to BRU2000, applixware, etc.) 2. If the above changes, many Linux users and developers would switch distributions. Of course, then people writing free software wouldn't be able to improve key components of the Redhat distro, which (presumably) would cause it to be left behind.
There are some real issues, however: 1. It is possible that commercial software vendors will only support Redhat. However, since detection of libraries works so easily, libraries wouldn't be a problem. The occassional shell script referring to, say,/usr/bin/perl instead of/usr/local/bin/perl can easily be fixed (or a symlink made.) And so it seems like it would (and thus far, has proved to be in several instances) fairly easy to construct wrapper scripts. Of course, that's not as good as a native package (rpm, deb, or whatever) but it's not so bad either.
2. Redhat is actively targetting newbies. This means that it's likely to get a prettier and prettier face by default, and hence one which is simpler. Hopefully, they will keep an "advanced options" button in an easy to find location. But if not, it's Linux -- we can find the text files to edit and configure by hand if need be. Of course, there's something to be said for being forced to read all the info. I learned a lot more from my first slackware install than I do from install Redhat by reading the package descriptions and being forced to figure out how to configure things. Nonetheless, these days, I'll take simplicity and sloth anyday.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the name of a project as something designed to give credit to various groups or individuals. And certainly, the name of a project is not designed to be an entire forum for political/philosophical discussion -- something the GNU project seems to have turned it into. Linux is a convinient and easy moniker, and I'm sticking with it.
Before people start flaming away, please note that this is clearly meant to be a satire, and not an actualy post from VA Linux.
Note:
1. The use of Slash-dot instead of Slashdot
2. The use of Captain Taco instead of Commander Taco.
3. The statement that in "90% of cases" Rob will retain editorial control.
Based on the comments I've actually seen, the vast majority of Linux users aren't particularly worried about Redhat achieving monopoly (or near-monopoly) power within the Linux market. There are two reasons:
/usr/bin/perl instead of /usr/local/bin/perl can easily be fixed (or a symlink made.) And so it seems like it would (and thus far, has proved to be in several instances) fairly easy to construct wrapper scripts. Of course, that's not as good as a native package (rpm, deb, or whatever) but it's not so bad either.
1. Redhat releases almost all of their products under the GPL, and releases all their "core" products under the GPL (ie libraries, rpm software, etc. as opposed to BRU2000, applixware, etc.)
2. If the above changes, many Linux users and developers would switch distributions. Of course, then people writing free software wouldn't be able to improve key components of the Redhat distro, which (presumably) would cause it to be left behind.
There are some real issues, however:
1. It is possible that commercial software vendors will only support Redhat. However, since detection of libraries works so easily, libraries wouldn't be a problem. The occassional shell script referring to, say,
2. Redhat is actively targetting newbies. This means that it's likely to get a prettier and prettier face by default, and hence one which is simpler. Hopefully, they will keep an "advanced options" button in an easy to find location. But if not, it's Linux -- we can find the text files to edit and configure by hand if need be. Of course, there's something to be said for being forced to read all the info. I learned a lot more from my first slackware install than I do from install Redhat by reading the package descriptions and being forced to figure out how to configure things. Nonetheless, these days, I'll take simplicity and sloth anyday.
-Muffie