Photo courtesy of Clark Maxwell
In the course of the discussion on the GNOME Foundation foundation-list this past month, Board candidate Bastien Nocera made the comment, "The large majority of contributors use Linux", inciting "Doctor" Richard Stallman, President-for-Life of the FSF, to respond, "The large majority of them use GNU/Linux. Linux is a kernel and won't run by itself."
Nocera, sensibly, replied, "This habit of correcting people is getting frankly old. I remember you being a pain at GUADEC in Copenhagen with your 'GNU/Linux' patches to the conference program...I'd like it if you stopped correcting my words."
This then continued to devolve into a discussion, of sorts, of the relative merits of the terms, few of which seemed to favor Stallman's position. Stormy Peters—explicitly not writing as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation—said, "I think this is a losing battle. i agree we need to continue to educate people, but I don't think GNU/Linux is going to be the way it happens. Millions of people now say Linux, and GNU/Linux is harder to say, uglier sounding...implies that we feel left out, etc. I really don't think it's going to be something that catches on no matter how many of us push it."
After several back-and-forth messages, list moderator Olav Vitters announced, "I won't approve of any such posts anymore. Find another list to discuss GNU vs GNU/Linux."
In outright defiance of this, Stallman continues the discussion with a message yesterday and yet another message today, in which he appears to clarify his motivations in all this:
Since calling the system "Linux" means giving the credit for our work (including GNOME) to Mr Torvalds, and that is unfair to all of us. So even aside from the beneficial consequences of saying "GNU/Linux", common decency requires it.
Once again, Mr. Stallman seems to be caught up in some sort of petty outrage over being, in his view, unfairly denied credit which Linus Torvalds is somehow getting at his expense. Stallman seems to have no qualms about using the GNOME Foundation's list to air his grievances, whether the moderator has declared the topic inappropriate or not.
It's puzzling. Either Stallman has no respect for the list's moderator and the other participants and feels his personal grudges are an overriding concern, or the list's moderator is affording Stallman some sort of special treatment in which the subject is only off-topic if you're someone other than Stallman.
It remains to be seen which of these is the case.
UPDATE: I've created a survey in order to gauge the feelings of the GNOME community on this (soi-disant) issue. Others can certainly participate, but it's the GNOME cross-tabulation in which I'm chiefly interested.
