[dundee] Advertising

[Andrew Clayton]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 14:03, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 01:01:53PM +0100, Mark Harrigan wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 12:19:51PM +0100, Simon Wells wrote:
> > > I like it, with a couple of minor changes, but can we get some feedback 
> > > from other list-members particularly with regard to the GNU thing? If 
> > > anybody doesn't like it can they suggest an alternative?
> > > Providing nobody has any problems I shall get some made up and onto 
> > > notice boards to entrap those innocent freshers!
> > > 
> > > Simon
> > 
> > It's a bit... ominous looking isn't it? How about a nice friendly tux?
> 
> I got bored of tux, he's was overused.
> 
> > As for the GNU bit, well it's easily removed and tbh I'd prefer
> > that. I have problems with some of the GNU policies and GNU/Linux in
> > particular, which I see as a very underhand way of Richard Stallman
> > forcing us to be grateful to him.
> 
> Some of us have problems with Linux developers pretending their kernel
> is a whole operating system.  KGX all the way.
> 

While a lot of us know that technically Linux is just the kernel. Over
the last decade or more, it's become generally accepted that the kernel
+ X + GNU + KDE etc is just called a Linux distribution. Or just
generalised down to Linux. I'm not saying this is sight or wrong, just
that, that is the way it is. Personally I'm fine with that. I do
recognise all the work the FSF, the XFree86 people, KDE people etc 
has done/is doing. But I think there are better ways for them to get
that recognition than trying to change the name of what we call Linux
distributions. Linux is the kernel the heart of a distribution so to me
the current naming makes sense.
 
Calling it GNU/Linux isn't really correct either as there is a lot more
than just the kernel + GNU in an average distribution. So IMHO just
calling it Linux is the right thing.

We should of course educate people more in what exactly makes up a Linux
distribution... ah some content for the website perhaps.. ;)


> :)
> 
> Jonathan Riddell
> 


Andrew