From kragen@dnaco.net Sat Aug 29 00:07:10 1998 Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998 00:07:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: "Bradley M. Kuhn" cc: clug-user@clug.org Subject: Re: Renaming of the group, CLUG -> CGLUG In-Reply-To: <19980828174319.L5562@ebb.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1565 Status: O X-Status: On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Thus spoke Kragen: > > I should point out that Symbolics Genera and IBM OS/360 are both > > considerably more stable than Linux, Genera and PolyForth are far more > > configurable, and OS/360 and Microsoft Windows are much better > > supported. > > > The reason I mention this is not that I think these are not valid reasons > > to choose Linux, but that it is possible to match them in a non-free OS -- > > so they are actually separate and distinct from its freeness. The > > argument that liking Linux's {configurability, stability, support} amounts > > to liking its freeness is invalid. > > Your point is valid here, but there is another point hidden among that: > Three are more (stable|configurable|supported) OS's than GNU/Linux. So, I > am at a loss why someone would choose GNU/Linux over other systems then. > That is the reason that I am digging for that no one has put forth. Well, it so happens that, of the four OSes I mentioned, only MS-Windows and possibly PolyForth run on PCs; Genera and OS/360 only run on extremely expensive proprietary hardware; and PolyForth is very expensive in itself. And none of them has all three advantages (stability, configurability, support) over Linux. I don't use Genera because I don't have a Symbolics Lisp machine or an Alpha, and they are expensive, and so is Genera. (And Symbolics keeps going bankrupt, which makes it hard to get Genera. I think they've gone bankrupt twice already, and they're working on try #3.) Also, most of the applications I want to use don't support Genera. I don't use OS/360 because I don't have an S/390, and none of the applications I want to use will run on it. (Well, maybe this has changed. It's supposed to be POSIX compliant now, right?) Oh, and I also like libre software. That's a major plus, too. > > > I disagree. CLUG is about Linux which happens to be free software. I'm > > > sure users of FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. would be perfectly welcome at CLUG > > > gatherings.[1] > > > > Agreed, on both counts. > > Kragen, don't you think that the name would turn away the FreeBSD crowd > immediately? > > And, as for the Solaris crowd, what place does it have in our group? I > really don't think we should be a Un*x User's group. Do you think we > should? I think we should be a fuzzy users' group. Score .5 for Linux, .2 for Unix, and .3 for libre software. So dosemu is .8 in the set, WABI is .7, WINE is .5-.8, Solaris is .2, etc. Kragen -- Kragen Sitaker We are forming cells within a global brain and we are excited that we might start to think collectively. What becomes of us still hangs crucially on how we think individually. -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web