Re: Bug#775436: ITP: xlennart -- An XBill fork but with Lennart and SystenD instead of Bill and Wingdows
Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.net> writes:
> While not a full-scale ad-hominem attack, I’d say that the two
> differences I know of between the vrms operation and the
> official FSF position amount to a misrepresentation at best.
> Are we going to drop that package, too?
I don't particularly care enough to argue for dropping it, but I always
have kind of wished that the author would rename it.
Personally, I just don't name software after people who aren't the author
of the software. It feels like unnecessary drama to me, or at least risks
it. That goes double for representations of other people in software that
they didn't write and didn't choose.
It's funny for a bit (I played xbill for about 30 minutes back in the
1990s when it first showed up and laughed at the time), and then it stops
being funny. It's not that Bill Gates would ever notice; it's that it's
one of those things that makes me feel like a slightly worse person than I
was before I did it. I already find it too easy to reduce people to
caricatures; intentionally practicing doing so doesn't feel like it leads
to any place good for how I think about the world. There are lots of
funny things in the world that don't subtlely undermine my ability to see
nuance and that don't feel like adding unnecessary drama to my life.
To be clear, that's strictly a personal opinion about why I choose not to
participate. I don't really care to argue about whether Debian should
include the package.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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