[AUUG-Talk]: Re: AUUG: Time to pull the plug?

[Stephen Rothwell]

Hi David,

On Sun, 17 Sep 2006 19:24:51 +0930 David Newall <david.newall at auug.org.au> wrote:
>
> Greg Black wrote:
> > On 2006-09-17, David Newall wrote:
> >   
> >> David Purdue wrote:
> >>     
> >>> To say "we have become the Linux community" leaves me (and many
> >>> AUUG members) disenfranchised.
> >>>       
> >> No it doesn't.  The Linux community doesn't, at least in my experience, 
> >> reject UNIX, any more than the UNIX community rejects Linux.  Don't be 
> >> precious about a name.
> >>     
> >
> > To describe somebody with a legitimate concern, expressed in a
> > completely fair manner, as "precious" seems to me to be lacking
> > in the level of courtesy we should hope for.  Surely we can do
> > without name calling and just confine ourselves to finding the
> > best way forwards?
> >   
> I've not called anybody names.  To the best of my ability to understand, 
> the difficulty that people have with Linux goes no further than the 
> difficulties that people used to have with SysV; or BSD; or OSF; or 
> whatever camp you weren't a part of.  UNIX has a time-honoured tradition 
> of this sort of pointless, trivial, wasteful, self-damaging division, 
> and it's clear that Linux has slipped in smoothly.  Linux *is*, in all 
> important respects, unix; the philosophy while not the law.  People are 
> happy to call all of those different operating systems, BSD, SysIII, 
> SysV, OSF1&2, AIX, all of them are UNIX, but Linux isn't.  You may 
> disagree with me, in fact apparently you do, but don't accuse me of name 
> calling when I accuse preciousness over a name.

Linux may have the philosophy of Unix, but is it not (exclusively) Unix
because there other things out there that also have the philosophy of
Unix and some of them are not even Open Source ...

The name is not David's issue, he works and uses and (probably) enjoys
operating systems that would never be covered by the Linux community
(Solaris comes to mind) and thus would be excluded if AUUG was just the
Linux community.

-- 
Cheers,
Stephen Rothwell                    sfr at canb.auug.org.au
http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~sfr/