I must make a clean breast of things: 1. linuxlingam is niyam bhushan. more details at niyam.com
2. been using linuxlingam as a nick since 10 years, no one ever said anything. a) people were only offended by 'linux' and not 'lingam'. b) U B Pavanja in Bangalore was hugely disappointed when he met me and discovered 'linuxlingam' is not a south indian brahmin, but a fat punjabi. no, this actually happened and he told me so. This during the famous 'indic workshop' conducted at PESIT circa 2000 or was it 2001/2? 3. Switched to using the nick 'linuxlingam' 10 years ago, when i used to write a popular weekly column for hindustantimes on IT and tech, including a small section on troubleshooting. Archives still available buried somewhere on my site. Since the article made it into other regional editions of HT, the unfortunate side-effect of the huge popularity (and fame?) the articles got me was that totally random and unknown people would dig up my number or email id and pester me 24x7, demanding I personally solve their PC problems free for them, by virtue of their being loyal readers of HT. [aside: we indians understand muft, but it's mukt i'm more interested to share] 4. to stay active and focussed on public mailing lists without this 'benevolent-spam' i switched to the nick 'linuxlingam'. what was my inspiration? at that point in time i was deeply fascinated by shiva. [no, i'm not religious in the mainstream sense, just deeply fascinated by world mythologies and more.] a) thus, in 1999 or 2000 i had also registered a domain: bhairon.com, bhairon is the name of an incarnation of shiva. my email-id at that time was thus: [email protected] which i hope showed where i'm coming from. b) at the same time, had also registered dumroo.com, another name inspired by shiva. the site currently holds some pretty outdated and irrelevant data. am considering using that domain for the music i frequently compose and produce for clients, for professional projects, and for my personal fun. c) my consulting firm, since 1995 or so, is called 'Digital Dionysus', where Dionysus is the greek god of wine, women, song, and dance, and according to Joseph Campbell, the myths of Dionysus has concurrence with the hindu-god shiva. incidentally, Joseph Campbell has tremendous insights to offer on Shiva, Dionysus, and Lingam, in his book "The Masks of God". May I recommend, Anjli, you please consider sifting through the book-series, especially the one called 'Oriental Mythology'. d) been using this email-id, not only on several FOSS mailing lists since ages, but also on IRC, on various foss-based software-project sites, and other places. Emails and public posts from this nick may be found on several hundred public sites and public discussion-threads, spread across the web. People across the FOSS community also know me by this nick's initials, 'LL' Once in a while, at public talks and seminars, I am sometimes addressed as Mr. Linux Lingam, or even as LL. 5. Nevertheless, I feel chivalry must stay alive even in the 21st century. Perhaps I should concede to your rather strange demand and will change my nick to something else, on the simple conditions: a) you legally ban all the people who use the word 'Lingam' in their names and surnames, including Mahalingam, Ramalingam, and other variants, as also the names 'Dick' and 'Pecker'. If the urbandictionary.com is to be believed, then even 'Peter' may be considered offending. May I state that ironically, you may thus end up offending millions of people on their religious, cultural, and other sentiments. So it would be rather prudent to end this matter here immediately. 6. On another note, may I strongly advise you to urgently change your mobile number, which you seem to have inadvertantly published on a large mailing list, which will be publicly archived. This means, your number is also available to anyone out there on the wild wild web, way beyond the people on this mailing list. Thank you everyone else who have responded to this thread with exactly the same sentiments. Time to lay this matter to rest. The Oracle Has Spoken. Er.. back to the thread: Eben Moglen's talk at the Knowledge Commons in Delhi was outstandingly brilliant. He had pertinent comments to make on Oracle, Google, Paul Allen, and other issues. Have requested Venky to urgently publish videos and audios of Eben's speech, so we may all learn from this chief proponent of FOSS, and spread and share his insights further. In fact, I feel at one level the Oracle vs Google debate may not just be about patents-trolling, and negotiating a balance-of-patents-sharing, but also a struggle to wrest control over cloud-based databases and database-engines. regards niyam bhushan _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
