4) The logo is aweful and unsuitable. "Oh boss, I'm just going to install this software with a devil on it.."
True! This hurts more then people think.
Agreed. But there doesn't seem to be any chance to have it change, or maybe an alternative logo being commonly used beside the'devil'.
If there was, the *BSDs would in fact get more installations, even though it may seem hard to believe at first that something like a logo might influence peoples decisions - but it does, sometimes.
from http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/mostfaqs.html#7: The source code available at OpenOffice.org does not consist of all of the StarOffice code. Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice that which it does not have permission to make available in OpenOffice.org. Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include: - Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts) - The database component (Adabas D) - Some templates - Extensive Clip Art Gallery - Some sorting functionality (Asian versions) - Certain file filters
OTOH, I agree with you if you wanted to imply that OO will probably, for most home users, do a good job and have quite the same functionality, I know it does for me.
...a better text for getting to know rms than the famous Hiroo Yamagata interview with him, which you can find, among other places, here: http://www.kde.org/food/rms.html After I met him in person and made experiences similar to those of Mr Yamagata, I wrote this comment: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1173 &cid=17086 86 Even though I still admire this guy in a way, his bruised ego can get on peoples nerves, it sure does that to me. Why can't he call this OS "GNU/Linux" and let others call it whatever they like, as long as both partners in the communication know what the other is talking about? Usually context will make clear if you are talking about an OS or a kernel. Freedom of software is fine, but what about a little more freedom of speech for the people you communicate with, Mr. Stallman? (C'mon, mod me down, I criticised rms:))
Congratulations to the KDE-team! I have sometimes installed a computer for not so computer literate people, (my wife, my then 4-year-old daughter, several elderly people), and sometimes, if they explicitly wished so, they had to pay for a windows license, more often they got KDE and StarOffice 5.2. The KDE users learned at least as much as fast, so much for the desktop-readyness of linux. (What I have seen from Gnome is certainly not worse in UI, so please use another post as a starter for the obligatory flame war:)) What I like to install if the user's machine has less horsepower, is xfce and lyx - also a fine combination with a useful interpretation of the desktop-metaphor in the wm, and imho easier to adapt to for users with a little ms-windows-background than the more nextish wms like blackbox etc.
Nope, they are in no way banned here, even though two or three years ago they tried to get a lot of international media attention claiming they were opressed. Truth is: they lost a court case regarding exemption from taxes as a religious non-profit-organisation (I mean, c'mon, sc. and non-profit...) _and_ organisations and business firms that do training, coaching and counselling for gouvernment agencies have to sign a declaration that they are not a part of sc. and that they will not introduce scientologic philosophy and methods - this rule was introduced whe plans had leaked to take over the gouvernment by means of setting up counselling and advisory firms, introducing sc. methods in gouvernment offices and recruiting decision-makers.
Hurd - would you really use it presently ?
on
More Marcelo Tosatti
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...for anything else than testing and playing around?
from http://kerneltrap.com/node.php?id=5
--
Q: How usable is the Hurd in its current version?
Neal Walfield: There has not been an official release of the Hurd since 1997. Most of the developers are concentrating on finishing the current feature set and working out important bugs.
With respect to usability, the Hurd works quite well as a desktop system, however, I would not yet recommend it to anyone as a server.
Q: How big is the team of people currently working on the Hurd?
Neal Walfield: There are currently about five people who work actively on the Hurd proper. As far as porting is concerned, there are about fifteen developers who participate regularly.
--
on the other hand, they integrated quite a lot of rather mature work from what has clearly been linux orientated development efforts, like filesystems, drivers and such - I wonder if RMS will call the final product GNU/Linux/HURD...:-)
hmmm, UID #458599, no mail adress - do you have an AOL-account, perhaps?
Anyway, you are right, I do not code. I could tell you something about the (network-related and not computer-related) work I do, but why bother?
Anything you dont like about me, from your profound knowledge of me as a person and also - your guess was right, even though I do not particularly like your wording - as a christian does not make my question less important. And my question was not "change the name of the OS", as you can easily read above.
By the way, care to show me some of the Open Source code you contibuted recently? - I am sure you can figure out my mail adress.
The Daemon logo does not very much concern me, since I can always use the OS, refer to it by its name and just not use the logo. Also, the logo by the way it is done in style, very much suggest itself as a kind of joke - I like jokes, I would not have made this one, but nevertheless, I make jokes or funny remarks in jest which others might object to very often, but they are usually marked as jokes.
It also would not bother me to have the logo on literature, CDs and so on, but to have an operation system force me to make a statement against my convictions every time I refer to it by its name I find unpleasant.
(I got to leave now, but will return in some hours, so if you reply and want an answer, please have some patience.)
I believe in God and that is a very important part of my live.
I would find it very unpleasant to use a machine or operating system that has a name which means "no god" or "without god".
Some of such names are not too important, of course, and I am not troubled by demons (or zombies) as names for smaller parts of an OS, belonging to the internals of it.
The name of the OS itself to me seems like a different kind of beast, since such names usually are statments, either about what the OS is mainly there for ("DOS"), what machine it is for ("MacOS"), that it sets out to do something new and different ("OS/2")or who wrote the kernel and which other system it is similar too ("linux").
The name, together with the history around it, can also make a political statement ("GNU", anyone?).
My question is: regardless wether you share my opinion that the name of your OS seems to be a statement of some sort, and regardless wether this is intentional or not, would you consider changing it if a sufficiently high number of potential users feels uncomfortable with it?
What should be kept in mind, however, is that the rfc covering the topic (no, I am not looking up the number for you;-) restricts the length of a TLD to 4 letters max. Some suggetions have come up that are happily ignoring this, of course, neither.gnu nor.sex are one of them...
Sorry to disagree, but... while Linux certainly is not the answer to every computing need (yet:-), there is not much reason for his grandfather to prefer the windows GUI to one of the the X GUIs, either. Some observation I made when letting my now 4 years old daughter use her PC for the first times: she did find it _very_ hard to get used to the double click for starting applications, which I think is still the default in Win 98, but did have no trouble whatsoever starting KDE apps. Yes, there is a double- and even a triple click in X as well, for marking text, but I wouldnt expect a beginner to use this, whereas one has to have a way to start applications. If the prospective user had any experience in using windows, that would be something different, and I would try to build on that. So, for my 4 year old daughter, the environment of choice is KDE, with only a few preselected icons, and I could imagine that to work for elderly people as well.
I have no experience with E or Gnome (though I plan to give Gnome a serious try as soon as it will have matured a little more, meanwhile I have work to do;-), but I have used fvwm quite a while and do a lot in KDE now. What I have come to install on weaker machines recently is XFCE: really elegant, CDE-like looks, easily user-confugurable, supports drag and drop of a sort and is relatively humble in its demand on the systems ressources. I do use a mixture of applications from "generic X" and KDE under it, and it probably will interact even better with Gnome-apps, since XFCE is GTK as well. I can really recommend this for smaller machines. BTW, since I dont have sufficient documentation with me right now: anyone around who knows if there is an option to start kfm in a way that it doesnt put any icons on the root-window and works only as a file-manager/thumbnail-viewer/browser etc.? I would like to play with it a little under XFCE, to find out if it interacts well with it, but I dont want the KDE-Style icons.
I stand corrected by Mr. A.C., the competent advocate of personal freedom, who knows and cleverly explains that the attempt to manipulate someone and to take away his freedom must have something to do with pointing a gun at him...
thanks for your answer. With regard to your RMS quotes (which can be read at the FSF' s website, among other interesting stuff), I know the reasoning behind it. There can of course be no doubt that Linux is first and foremost a kernel, but it is not an uncommon practice to name an operating system like the kernel, even in the situation of commercial OSs, where a lot of tools and utilitys may have been bought from other companies. As I wrote above, this seems to be a naming convention a vast majority of people seem to have agreed upon in the case of BlueSocks. While I have no intention whatsoever to deny the importance of the GNU software included in the distros, I also see that a lot of the system programs neither come from the GNU project nor have been released under the GPL (or LGPL). I just dont see why in such a mixed system we should credit GNU, with all its merits, more than BSD, for example. And I agree - it would be foolish to include all the contributing projects or licenses used in the name, so why make an exception for GNU? One more point: you said that RMS isn't denying me anything. This is true in his writings, but as I wrote in my second posting above, his practical behaviour, in particular towards journalists, is quite different...
Facts, friend: While he certainly never denied me _in person_ the right to call linux linux (that was a figure of speech), I have read several verbatim interviews where he did deny that right to the interviewing journalist who dared to ask him something about "linux". He practically refused to answer any further question if it wasnt worded with "GNU/Linux". Since obviously RMS did _not_ have trouble to understand what the interviewer meant and since we can safely assume that he agreed on an interview before (try imagine RMS not taking a chance for publicity...), he denied the reporter the right to call linux linux, under the threat of childishly (to adapt to your wording) backing away from the interview. Besides, we can also attribute RMSs vocabulary problem to a lack of foresight - if he really wanted to have everyone use the term "GNU/Linux" he should have put a reference clause into the license in the first place ("all derived work must get a name starting with "GNU/"") - but wait - a license clause forcing to give credit to some organisation has just become available really cheap, I heard;-) Having said all this, I really do appreciate RMS for the code he wrote and gave away freely and the movement he started, I will always give him credit for his work and have often done so in evangelizing linux, but I still reserve the right to say that he sometimes sucks as a philosopher and that he sucks _a lot_ as would-be linguistic dictator.
Thing with RMS is, besides being a great hacker and heroe of free software, he also has become a hippocrite due to his bruised ego for not having had the final success with his _complete_ GNU OS. He constantly insists on Linux being called GNU/Linux to get some of the respect for his work he undoubtedly deserves - and in my opinion often gets - but doesnt perceive to receive (pardon my wording, its kinda late and Im not a native speaker...) Doing so, he makes the free software world less free by denying me the right to freely call software what I want to call it, and what seemingly most people inside and outside the free software world have agreed to call it. Besides, if we apply his own reasoning (it includes a lotta code from us) to his own pet, namely the too-little-too-late HURD, we have to call it Linux/HURD - next to all of the code for hardware drivers in the HURD has been taken from the respective linux-drivers, as a Debian GNU/HURD developer explained to me the other day...
Having done several kinds of welfare work myself, even though in a different legal system over here in germany, I would like to invest my 2 Pfennig: If you are not a person who likes paperwork and legal matters, dont try to start your own organisation, even if it only has a membership of 1. Instead, try to join an existing agency that you are comfortable with, preferrably where you share a common background in religion or philosophy. Even if they didnt offer any services in the computer field yet, it shouldnt be to hard to convince someone to let you sail under their flag. This also helps a lot in the aquisition of used hardware, because - at least in my experience - potential donors have the strange tendency to ask "Well, if I give you this practically new 4-MB-386, is it tax-deductible?" By making it absolutely clear from the beginning that you do what you do when you want, as long as you want and basically where you want, you can keep your freedom and still use an existing infrastructure for the benefit of all - you do the good work, the organisation gains in reputation and the kids get a better future - as far as technology can help to achieve it, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
my
True! This hurts more then people think.
Agreed. But there doesn't seem to be any chance to have it change, or maybe an alternative logo being commonly used beside the'devil'.
If there was, the *BSDs would in fact get more installations, even though it may seem hard to believe at first that something like a logo might influence peoples decisions - but it does, sometimes.
should be BeAtOS, or GNU/BeAtOS for rms and the 5 HURD-developers
from http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/mostfaqs.html#7 :
The source code available at OpenOffice.org does not consist of all of the StarOffice code. Usually, the reason for this is that Sun pays to license third party code to include in StarOffice that which it does not have permission to make available in OpenOffice.org. Those things which are or will be present in StarOffice but are not available on OpenOffice.org include:
- Certain fonts (including, especially, Asian language fonts)
- The database component (Adabas D)
- Some templates
- Extensive Clip Art Gallery
- Some sorting functionality (Asian versions)
- Certain file filters
OTOH, I agree with you if you wanted to imply that OO will probably, for most home users, do a good job and have quite the same functionality, I know it does for me.
...a better text for getting to know rms than the famous Hiroo Yamagata interview with him, which you can find, among other places, here:3 &cid=17086 86
http://www.kde.org/food/rms.html
After I met him in person and made experiences similar to those of Mr Yamagata, I wrote this comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=117
Even though I still admire this guy in a way, his bruised ego can get on peoples nerves, it sure does that to me. Why can't he call this OS "GNU/Linux" and let others call it whatever they like, as long as both partners in the communication know what the other is talking about? Usually context will make clear if you are talking about an OS or a kernel.
Freedom of software is fine, but what about a little more freedom of speech for the people you communicate with, Mr. Stallman?
(C'mon, mod me down, I criticised rms:))
Congratulations to the KDE-team!
I have sometimes installed a computer for not so computer literate people, (my wife, my then 4-year-old daughter, several elderly people), and sometimes, if they explicitly wished so, they had to pay for a windows license, more often they got KDE and StarOffice 5.2.
The KDE users learned at least as much as fast, so much for the desktop-readyness of linux.
(What I have seen from Gnome is certainly not worse in UI, so please use another post as a starter for the obligatory flame war:))
What I like to install if the user's machine has less horsepower, is xfce and lyx - also a fine combination with a useful interpretation of the desktop-metaphor in the wm, and imho easier to adapt to for users with a little ms-windows-background than the more nextish wms like blackbox etc.
Nope, they are in no way banned here, even though two or three years ago they tried to get a lot of international media attention claiming they were opressed.
Truth is: they lost a court case regarding exemption from taxes as a religious non-profit-organisation (I mean, c'mon, sc. and non-profit...) _and_ organisations and business firms that do training, coaching and counselling for gouvernment agencies have to sign a declaration that they are not a part of sc. and that they will not introduce scientologic philosophy and methods - this rule was introduced whe plans had leaked to take over the gouvernment by means of setting up counselling and advisory firms, introducing sc. methods in gouvernment offices and recruiting decision-makers.
from http://kerneltrap.com/node.php?id=5
--
Q: How usable is the Hurd in its current version?
Neal Walfield: There has not been an official release of the Hurd since 1997. Most of the developers are concentrating on finishing the current feature set and working out important bugs.
With respect to usability, the Hurd works quite well as a desktop system, however, I would not yet recommend it to anyone as a server.
Q: How big is the team of people currently working on the Hurd?
Neal Walfield: There are currently about five people who work actively on the Hurd proper. As far as porting is concerned, there are about fifteen developers who participate regularly.
--
on the other hand, they integrated quite a lot of rather mature work from what has clearly been linux orientated development efforts, like filesystems, drivers and such - I wonder if RMS will call the final product GNU/Linux/HURD... :-)
Anyway, you are right, I do not code. I could tell you something about the (network-related and not computer-related) work I do, but why bother?
Anything you dont like about me, from your profound knowledge of me as a person and also - your guess was right, even though I do not particularly like your wording - as a christian does not make my question less important. And my question was not "change the name of the OS", as you can easily read above.
By the way, care to show me some of the Open Source code you contibuted recently? - I am sure you can figure out my mail adress.
Hmmm, does that make my question invalid?
The Daemon logo does not very much concern me, since I can always use the OS, refer to it by its name and just not use the logo. Also, the logo by the way it is done in style, very much suggest itself as a kind of joke - I like jokes, I would not have made this one, but nevertheless, I make jokes or funny remarks in jest which others might object to very often, but they are usually marked as jokes.
It also would not bother me to have the logo on literature, CDs and so on, but to have an operation system force me to make a statement against my convictions every time I refer to it by its name I find unpleasant.
(I got to leave now, but will return in some hours, so if you reply and want an answer, please have some patience.)
I would find it very unpleasant to use a machine or operating system that has a name which means "no god" or "without god".
Some of such names are not too important, of course, and I am not troubled by demons (or zombies) as names for smaller parts of an OS, belonging to the internals of it.
The name of the OS itself to me seems like a different kind of beast, since such names usually are statments, either about what the OS is mainly there for ("DOS"), what machine it is for ("MacOS"), that it sets out to do something new and different ("OS/2")or who wrote the kernel and which other system it is similar too ("linux"). The name, together with the history around it, can also make a political statement ("GNU", anyone?).
My question is: regardless wether you share my opinion that the name of your OS seems to be a statement of some sort, and regardless wether this is intentional or not, would you consider changing it if a sufficiently high number of potential users feels uncomfortable with it?
What should be kept in mind, however, is that the rfc covering the topic (no, I am not looking up the number for you ;-) restricts the length of a TLD to 4 letters max. .gnu nor .sex are one of them...
Some suggetions have come up that are happily ignoring this, of course, neither
It is Tom Jennings!
Anyone remember FidoNet?
Sorry to disagree, but... :-), there is not much reason for his grandfather to prefer the windows GUI to one of the the X GUIs, either. Some observation I made when letting my now 4 years old daughter use her PC for the first times: she did find it _very_ hard to get used to the double click for starting applications, which I think is still the default in Win 98, but did have no trouble whatsoever starting KDE apps. Yes, there is a double- and even a triple click in X as well, for marking text, but I wouldnt expect a beginner to use this, whereas one has to have a way to start applications. If the prospective user had any experience in using windows, that would be something different, and I would try to build on that.
while Linux certainly is not the answer to every computing need (yet
So, for my 4 year old daughter, the environment of choice is KDE, with only a few preselected icons, and I could imagine that to work for elderly people as well.
I have no experience with E or Gnome (though I plan to give Gnome a serious try as soon as it will have matured a little more, meanwhile I have work to do;-), but I have used fvwm quite a while and do a lot in KDE now.
What I have come to install on weaker machines recently is XFCE: really elegant, CDE-like looks, easily user-confugurable, supports drag and drop of a sort and is relatively humble in its demand on the systems ressources.
I do use a mixture of applications from "generic X" and KDE under it, and it probably will interact even better with Gnome-apps, since XFCE is GTK as well.
I can really recommend this for smaller machines.
BTW, since I dont have sufficient documentation with me right now: anyone around who knows if there is an option to start kfm in a way that it doesnt put any icons on the root-window and works only as a file-manager/thumbnail-viewer/browser etc.?
I would like to play with it a little under XFCE, to find out if it interacts well with it, but I dont want the KDE-Style icons.
I stand corrected by Mr. A.C., the competent advocate of personal freedom, who knows and cleverly explains that the attempt to manipulate someone and to take away his freedom must have something to do with pointing a gun at him...
intol,
thanks for your answer.
With regard to your RMS quotes (which can be read at the FSF' s website, among other interesting stuff), I know the reasoning behind it. There can of course be no doubt that Linux is first and foremost a kernel, but it is not an uncommon practice to name an operating system like the kernel, even in the situation of commercial OSs, where a lot of tools and utilitys may have been bought from other companies. As I wrote above, this seems to be a naming convention a vast majority of people seem to have agreed upon in the case of BlueSocks.
While I have no intention whatsoever to deny the importance of the GNU software included in the distros, I also see that a lot of the system programs neither come from the GNU project nor have been released under the GPL (or LGPL). I just dont see why in such a mixed system we should credit GNU, with all its merits, more than BSD, for example. And I agree - it would be foolish to include all the contributing projects or licenses used in the name, so why make an exception for GNU?
One more point: you said that RMS isn't denying me anything. This is true in his writings, but as I wrote in my second posting above, his practical behaviour, in particular towards journalists, is quite different...
Yep!
Facts, friend: ;-)
While he certainly never denied me _in person_ the right to call linux linux (that was a figure of speech), I have read several verbatim interviews where he did deny that right to the interviewing journalist who dared to ask him something about "linux".
He practically refused to answer any further question if it wasnt worded with "GNU/Linux". Since obviously RMS did _not_ have trouble to understand what the interviewer meant and since we can safely assume that he agreed on an interview before (try imagine RMS not taking a chance for publicity...), he denied the reporter the right to call linux linux, under the threat of childishly (to adapt to your wording) backing away from the interview.
Besides, we can also attribute RMSs vocabulary problem to a lack of foresight - if he really wanted to have everyone use the term "GNU/Linux" he should have put a reference clause into the license in the first place ("all derived work must get a name starting with "GNU/"") - but wait - a license clause forcing to give credit to some organisation has just become available really cheap, I heard
Having said all this, I really do appreciate RMS for the code he wrote and gave away freely and the movement he started, I will always give him credit for his work and have often done so in evangelizing linux, but I still reserve the right to say that he sometimes sucks as a philosopher and that he sucks _a lot_ as would-be linguistic dictator.
Thing with RMS is, besides being a great hacker and heroe of free software, he also has become a hippocrite due to his bruised ego for not having had the final success with his _complete_ GNU OS.
He constantly insists on Linux being called GNU/Linux to get some of the respect for his work he undoubtedly deserves - and in my opinion often gets - but doesnt perceive to receive (pardon my wording, its kinda late and Im not a native speaker...)
Doing so, he makes the free software world less free by denying me the right to freely call software what I want to call it, and what seemingly most people inside and outside the free software world have agreed to call it.
Besides, if we apply his own reasoning (it includes a lotta code from us) to his own pet, namely the too-little-too-late HURD, we have to call it Linux/HURD - next to all of the code for hardware drivers in the HURD has been taken from the respective linux-drivers, as a Debian GNU/HURD developer explained to me the other day...
Having done several kinds of welfare work myself, even though in a different legal system over here in germany, I would like to invest my 2 Pfennig:
If you are not a person who likes paperwork and legal matters, dont try to start your own organisation, even if it only has a membership of 1. Instead, try to join an existing agency that you are comfortable with, preferrably where you share a common background in religion or philosophy.
Even if they didnt offer any services in the computer field yet, it shouldnt be to hard to convince someone to let you sail under their flag. This also helps a lot in the aquisition of used hardware, because - at least in my experience - potential donors have the strange tendency to ask "Well, if I give you this practically new 4-MB-386, is it tax-deductible?"
By making it absolutely clear from the beginning that you do what you do when you want, as long as you want and basically where you want, you can keep your freedom and still use an existing infrastructure for the benefit of all - you do the good work, the organisation gains in reputation and the kids get a better future - as far as technology can help to achieve it, that is.