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| Remember that meeting a few years ago (in the latter days of the BCS | Linux SIG) when Richard Stallman visited us unannounced to make | his case that the group should be called the GNU/Linux group? Well, IMHO, I think we should start calling it "lignux". That oughta be good for a couple of running puns ... | The debate continues. Look on the front page of the Sunday Globe | business section for Hiawatha Bray's story about the open software | movement, complete with photos of Torvalds and Stallman. Linus gets | two photos, RMS gets one bigger one. Also, I noticed a few factual errors. For instance, in the list of other open-software "products", perl was described as a language designed for writing the scripts behind the Web. This surely indicates a great deal of prescience on the part of Larry Wall, since the earliest versions of perl were posted on the net several years before the first web software appeared (1987 vs 1989). (I just checked with the web site, and noticed something interesting: the online version of the article doesn't make the claim that perl was invented for writing web scripts. Maybe someone already told the Globe about this claim for ESP on Larry's part. ;-) | News reporters seem to focus their comments on how Linux affects | Microsoft's future prospects. Personally, I see Linux having a far | greater long-term impact on Sun Microsystems than on Microsoft. Has anyone anywhere actually ever made a choice between DOS/W95 and any Unix-like system? I've never seen any real evidence that they are competing at all. People who want one typically don't even look at the other. Calling them competitors is like thinking that autos are competing with bicycles and airplanes. Maybe someone somewhere has occasionally made such a tradeoff, but treating them as economic competitors mostly indicates cluelessness. The main effect of linux on the DOS world has been to increase hardware sales by 10% or so, mostly to people who would have otherwise paid somewhat more for Sun or HP hardware. | Poll: who's right? Did Linus tender Linux as a contribution to the | GNU project, or did RMS tender the GNU environment to the Linux | community? ;-) Good troll ... - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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