On December 13, 2013, Michael Torrie wrote: > There's no legal obligation to do so though, provided they honor the
> terms of the licenses of the source code they are distributing. Yea, I know. Doesn't mean I necessarily AGREE, but I do understand they aren't violating any laws other than my morals. :S > GNU/Linux. Red Hat certainly doesn't; nor does Mint or SuSE. Granted Well, they may not refer to themselves as GNU/Linux, but they do put the word Linux in their name somewhere. At least as I understand it they do. I.e. the L in RHEL = Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and of course there's SLED (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). I seem to recall "Mint Linux" being mentioned, but I could be off on that one, I'll admit. > Google does the same thing as Ubuntu with Android. A lot of us geeks Well yea, but Android is a bit different. First, they tell anyone who's curious that Android is based on Linux. And that's the point. It's _based on_ Linux. It's stated. People may not really care that much, but it is there. Google isn't trying to hide it, they just don't go to great pains to make it known either. I don't have a problem with that. We're all guilty of that from time to time. I've lost track of how often I'll say things like "Well I will stick with my trusted Gentoo setup". That's easy when the whole discussion was about Linux to start. But if it wasn't, but was more just about operating systems in general, then I really should say "Gentoo Linux" or something along those lines. But I'm not actively trying to hide the Linux portion either. That sounds to me like what Canonical is trying to do. Perhaps I'm interpreting it wrong. But it sounds like they're trying to convince those who don't look that closely that Ubuntu is a Unix like O/S, but NOT Linux. > Even Gnome has set out to become its own OS (google for Gnome OS) brand > even as it becomes a project tied tightly to the Linux kernel. Now that just crazy. Are you saying that Gnome is basically working to become it's own distro (naming aside)? Thanks but no thanks. I never really cared for Gnome as a window interface. Having a whole distro based on it would be painful for me. I'm sure others will go for it, but that's one for me to mark on my "Must Avoid" list. :( > I may not agree with the Gnome team in any way, but I do see more and > more that the operating system itself is irrelevant to most people and > most tasks. It's just a small part of the platform and services that > people really care about. Yea, this is true. I'm starting to see that myself. I don't particularly LIKE it, given how hard I've been evangelizing Linux all through the years. But still, I suppose it what's going to happen. Maybe I can keep MS bashing at least, trying to convince others that running a closed source OS like Windows is a bad idea. Of course it probably won't be THAT much longer at the rate we're going before everything is cloud based, and we're all using something like Chrome OS to boot our machines and run programs that are entirely contained on the web, to edit files entirely contained on the web. I really shudder at this idea, but it seems to be gaining traction. A lot of programs that used to be on the computer itself are either only on the web, or have web counterparts. > If you want to take the source code to an old MUD, you are free to > change the name so that the original name isn't mentioned, provided you > abide by the terms of the source code license. It's a time-honored open > source and free software tradition called "forking". > I believe you may have heard of a little piece of software called > "LibreOffice." Or a maybe a little software project called "X.org" Or a > minor operating system called "OS X." I do see your point, but perhaps my understanding is incomplete on that. My understanding of forking was that you could change the name everywhere, but you still needed to say somewhere (even if it's just buried in the user docs) that this is "Based on <project X>" until you had changed at least 10% of the source code. My point was the idea that I took the source code, and the ONLY thing I changed was the name. Since that name is stored in perhaps four or five files of the entire mud library (which routinely gets over 300 files) that's less than a .001% change of the overall source code. At that point what was always done was to say "Library X, based on library Y", i.e. "Running PowerMudlib 0.5, based on TMI 2.4.1". THAT was considered acceptable. But just saying "Running PowerMudlib 0.5" itself wasn't unless you had changed that requisite 10% of the code. This was my point. :) --- Dan However, I do understand /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
