On Jul 16, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Alexandre Oliva wrote: >> >>> I'm not the one trying to dictate the name used for other people's >>> software. I think it is wrong. >> >> I'm happy you agree it's wrong. This means you wouldn't side with the >> people who did just that to the GNU operating system, when they >> started calling it Linux, would you? > I'd rather see it called the xwindow system if you are going to give > any particular chunk more credit than the rest in the name The "X Window System" is a well-known term, and it definitely isn't the name of an operating system. It is the name of a component, and an optional one while at that, as you pointed out. Besides, it's not a matter of selecting at random who're going to give credit to. This doesn't make sense. You can't go 'hey, ma, look this book I wrote' when what you wrote was only the preface. It isn't reasonable is to pick the name of a minor contributor and make it seem like that one was the main contributor. It's dishonest. If you have to choose only one contributor to refer to the work, it's just reasonable to choose the largest contributor, even if that contributor didn't contribute more than the sum of the contributions of the others. And then, there's nothing wrong in naming more than one, as long as the naming is fair, i.e., it matches reasonably the amount of contribution. And then remember we're talking about operating systems, not kernels and not distributions. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
