On Mon, 3 Apr 2000, Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> > Originally www.newyen.com was supposed to be my main website. I had some
> > run-ins with the state of California about Newyen being very similiar to
> > "Nguyen, Inc.". I decided to change the name to Gnuyen instead.
> >
> > The name came from two words: gnu and yen.
> >
> > gnu - "Freedom"
> > yen - "There's no free lunch" or "currency in Japanese"
> Aren't you afraid that the Gnu in Gnuyen will be confused with GNU from
> the Free Software Foundation? It's probably flame bait.
GNU was originally meant "Not Unix". Stallman is a derivative of MIT. He
extend GNU to mean "free speech" as of late.
The reason I named it as so is the ying yang stuff. There's always extreme
right or extreme left. When I was studying economics there is this term
called "opportunity cost". It means, whatever I'm doing now can be better
doing something else. I have over the years tried to optimize my
opportunity cost. I want to leverage the best possible senerios to
maximize my utility. People who write free software feels that writing
code and giving it out for free is how they can maximize their utility.
Utility can be in form of money or in the form of feeling good.
Ultimately there's an "opportunity cost" for writing free software. The
average basis for sustaining life in the US only cost about $300/mo that's
below the minimum wage; some people I know can sustain life with only
$50/mo. ... that is living in the street. I think Stallman has sustained
the foundation of life thus he puruses"self-actualization" (Abraham
Maslow's idea). Self-actualization is doing something you like to do and
become better at it. That's where the GNU part comes in. It won't come
in if sustaining life is not satisfied.
Here comes the Yen part. In order to have growth there needs to be
capital investment. People don't work on GNU basis. They wanted to be
paid. That's why I said "there's no free lunch". It would be nice if
Stallman can me develop some of the things I have on my list; I
don't mind putting it out as GPL. Just that he probably doesn't have time
due to his publicity nature as of late or lack the interest to pursue
or the opportunity cost is not worth it.
If Stallman feels strongly about "copyright", "trademark", and "patent",
then I'll gladly give up the prefix "GNU" like I did with "Newyen" and
replace Gnuyen to a different name.
Conflict is good. :) It gets people to think.
Kent
>
> -jj
>
>
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