[Talk] Some thoughts on AUUG, LUG's and their future

[Conrad Parker]

On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 11:42:26AM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Wednesday,  3 July 2002 at  1:04:36 +1000, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
> > [quoting Steve Jenin]
> >> - Rebrand AUUG EG: - "Aust Unix/Linux/BSD User Group"
> > This I really disagree with, it smacks of Stallman's push for
> > GNU/ABC/DEF/GHI/IJK/Linux.  If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck,
> > and walks like a duck, it's a duck.
> >
> > Extend it, yes, as we did when we became the "Australian UNIX and Open
> > Systems User Group", but keep the AUUG name/symbol as it is.
> 
> I have a concern about the term "Open Systems".  It has a late 80s,
> early 90s smell about it.  I think that we should remove that term,
> but it's not clear what to replace it with.  The best I have come up
> with so far has been "AUUG: Australian UNIX and related systems User
> Group".  Comments?  Improvements?

The crux of the problem appears to be that nowadays when we talk about
Unix, we're not always talking about "UNIX(tm)", a particular product
and licensing, but about all systems that share "the Unix philosophy" in
their design (as outlined, for example, in the book "The Unix Philosophy"
by Mike Gancarz, Digital Press 1994). This philosophy covers things like
the use of small, cooperating tools rather than monolithic applications,
the widespread use of scripting to glue these together, the simplicity of
a ubiquitous file abstraction for I/O and a standard systems interface.

It'd be nice if we could simply keep calling this "Unix" without having to
resort to "Unix and related" or an impossibly exhaustive list. Perhaps we
can't for legal reasons, and perhaps we should simply replace one of the
vowels with a star and be done with it.

Going further, perhaps the Unix trademark only covers operating systems
products, not design philosophies, and maybe we can legally go about quite
happily promoting and applying "the Unix philosophy" even if our actions
incorporate the use of non-UNIX(tm) software like Linux and BSD. At
the end of the day, I believe this is what we're actually doing anyway.

Conrad.