On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 04:21:32PM +0100, Jeroen Dekkers wrote: > On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 10:19:39AM +0100, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote: >> Hmmm, I see another common thing there: if the OS-core where a proggy is >> developed on is Linux, the program is called a Linux-program. Few people >> really care to look at what they are using .... > Yes, first of all they forget to give GNU credit. You should not do > that for RMS' ego, but because the project deserves it, they wrote a > big part of the OS and made Linux possible. Also if nobody knows where > some programs come from, they also can't see that they aren't actually > maintained upstream (which is the case for some GNU utils). Besides > those things, the GNU philosophy is also very useful and I've never > seen something like that on the big "Linux" sites (or maybe I haven't > looked carefully, that could also be the case). And confrontationally pointing this out to people every time they use the word 'Linux' alone to refer to the OS is extremely anti-social. RMS is a genius and a hermit. What's *your* excuse? > Second, I wished it were only their words. In fact most programmers > don't know or don't care about portability. The amount of Linuxisms in > programs is very big, I think the amount of GNUisms is even bigger as > most developers use the GNU tools and glibc to make their programs, > they don't use Linux directly. Joining RMS's "what's in a name?" crusade isn't going to make most programmers care about portability. In fact, NOTHING is going to make most programmers care about portability, except when it's portability to their own platform. As someone who takes pains to make his code as portable as possible, I can attest to the fact that writing portable code SUCKS. It's a lot of work for very little gain. And while you can't force anyone to work on anything they don't want to in the Free Software community, giving them a hard time for not supporting (or crediting) your pet OS is a great way to trick them into /not/ doing the work you want them to. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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