Well I dont think many people outside of FSF care. Its harder to say GNU/Linux and more people simply call it just linux. We should respect the FSF but its not a big deal in my opinion. Its just politics.
Regards Shane Fagan On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 17:07 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: > Marketing Team: > > The Free Software Foundation (FSF) encourages the usage of the term > "GNU/Linux" instead of the term "Linux", and also discourages referring > to free software and licenses as "open source". Their argument, which > I think is valid, is that doing so helps to highlight free software and > bring positive attention towards the free software community. > > A few people have recently complained to the board that the GNOME > community sometimes does not always follow these recommendations. I > imagine that some of these issues are caused by people just not being > thoughtful about the terminology that they use, but I also do not > believe that the GNOME community has an official stance on what language > we should be using. At any rate, we should probably be consistent with > the language we use in more official GNOME Foundation communications. > So, I think it is good to discuss and find out what the overall GNOME > community thinks about this before making any sort of decision or > encouraging people to use one term or another. > > On one hand, since we are a GNU project and since one of the > long-standing objectives of the GNOME community has been to promote > free software, there is a good argument for following these > recommendations and making it a more official policy that we try to > use the terminology recommended by the FSF. > > On the other hand, I know that some people in our community feel that > it makes more sense to use the terms "Linux" and "open source" since > they have more traction in the business world, and are more familiar. > We often have trouble explaining what "GNOME" is to people, and it > perhaps makes it harder when we use terms that are unfamiliar or that > do not have traction. So, there may be situations or types of > communication where going against the FSF recommendations makes sense. > However, if we feel that we should go against the recommendations of the > FSF, we probably should have some solid reasoning for doing so. > > Also, I think the GNOME Foundation needs to be sensitive to those > partners with which we have close working relationships. For example, > we need to be sensitive to what opinions those on the advisory board > might have to say about the terminology we use. So, I have suggested to > Stormy that we raise this topic at an upcoming advisory board meeting > and find out what they think about this. Whether or not they care would > likely be an important input to consider in making any decision. > > Perhaps it makes sense to use different terms when talking to different > audiences. Perhaps we should make more of an effort to use the terms > recommended by the FSF when communicating with some audiences, and use > other terms in other situations. If so, perhaps we need to think about > when it makes sense to use which terms and make this more clear so > people have some guidance about what terms to use and when. > > So, I am interested to hear what the GNOME marketing community thinks > about this. Since many of the documents where we use these terms are > in public-facing documents such as marketing materials, PR, press > releases, etc. I think whatever terms we use should be something that > the marketing team thinks about and has input on any decisions made. > > Thoughts? > > Brian -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list