From kragen@dnaco.net Fri Aug 28 10:17:18 1998 Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:17:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Kragen To: Richard Westcott cc: clug-user@clug.org Subject: Re: Renaming of the group, CLUG -> CGLUG In-Reply-To: <35E605A2.A2BB1DD9@isoc.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Keywords: X-UID: 1542 Status: O X-Status: On Thu, 27 Aug 1998, Richard Westcott wrote: > Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > > This statement makes no sense. GNU/Linux (and the Linux kernel in > > particular) is all free software. What point is there to use GNU/Linux if > > you are not interested in using free software? Indeed, if free software is > > not the goal, then why don't we simply rename ourselves to the Cincinnati > > Un*x-like OS User's Group? > > To me, linux's stability, configurability and growing support rank right > up there with its freeness. For me, if Linux was a commercial OS as > robust as it is as a free OS at a reasonable cost, I would still be a > Linux user.[0] 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. I know quite a bit about Perl (although I am by no means an expert). The way I got to know so much about Perl was that I had parents with enough money to support me while I was in college. If I were to get hired for a job programming Perl, it would likely be because of my knowledge. It would be incorrect to say I got hired because my parents weren't poor -- after all, other people might have learned about Perl in other ways, such as by playing with it on their Linux box after they came home from work. > > There is no reason to make a *SIG* for free software---CGLUG is about free > > software directly just by what the group is. > > 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 -- 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