As an aside, the questions that were sent to Mr. Mewburn have been
forwarded to the rest of TNF's Board, and scheduled for discussion on their
next conference call (in a couple of days). His personal reaction to the
thought of renaming the ports to 'codenames' was quite positive; in his
(personal) opinion, it would resolve pretty much the entire question.
We'll know in a few days whether the rest of the Board agrees with that
view, but for now, I would take it as a positive sign that this direction
is very likely to result in everyone (well, okay, as much of 'everyone' as
we can manage) being happy.
And now...
On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 11:01:49AM +0100, David Weinehall wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 08:47:28PM -0500, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote:
> > On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, Nathan Hawkins wrote:
> >
> > > Your proposal would change that. I oppose it, and I would oppose it just
> > > the same if you wanted to call them Loki, Kali or Hitler. (To pick a few
> > > at random.) Using names of evil, real or imagined, is not something
> > > that would be helpful to Debian. That kind of publicity we don't need.
> >
> > Nathan,
> >
> > I understand what you are trying to say but just fyi, there is nothing
> > remotely evil about the Goddess Kali in Hinduism.
>
> Loki isn't that evil either; he's just the god of mischief, hence more
> of a prankster than anything else. Anyway, the comparision of mythical
> creatures with the frontal figure of one of the biggest mass murders of
> all time is beyond absurd...
Debian Hitler, Debian Stalin, Debian Saddam (and, of course, Debian Bush,
Debian Clinton, Debian Blair, Debian Kohl... what, you thought I was naming
something other than political figures? :)
> Of course, I don't really think we should merit religious nonsense with
> the honour of giving name to the products of Debian labour anyway...
> And if we do, let's choose one of the religions noone believes in...
> Branden's second proposal of using something from Pratchett did have a
> nice ring to it, and then there's always the valar.
Actually, given that I'm a long-time and deep-seated Tolkien geek, I rather
like the notion of using the Valar - they're fictional, and Tolkien's work
isn't yet out from under copyright, but they *are* reasonably well-known
(Okay, not as well as Pratchett, but better than Christian demonology),
and if we're liable to get in trouble over using just the names, we should
probably strongly reconsider our use of Toy Story character names for
tagging distributions...
Suppose it's time to dig out my reference books and see if I can come up
with a suitable set of names out of that mythos.
Besides, using Tolkien names is a long geek tradition.
> Hmm, come to think of it, money is what most people worship nowadays, so
> maybe Debian GNU/Pesetas, Debian GNU/Zloty, and Debian GNU/Yen?! All
> hail capitalism! This would be quite fitting right now, since most of
> the western world is celebrating capitalism's supremacy next week (of
> course, some celebrate it religiously for historical reasons, but they
> seem to be a minority nowadays...)
Amusing, but I don't think so. :)
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU/KLNetBSD(i386) porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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