A new abuse of the Linux term [LWN.net]

A new abuse of the Linux term

Posted Feb 25, 2006 1:56 UTC (Sat) by bignose (subscriber, #40)
Parent article: A new Linux worm

Linux is the name of a program: an operating system kernel. This is a worm affecting PHP. In what way is this a "Linux worm"? If anything that exploits a particular system configuration, that happens to also include Linux, is to be called a "Linux worm", the term becomes indistinguishable from exploits that *do* affect Linux. By that logic, a better term would be an "Apache worm", since "a system running Apache" is far more likely to be also running PHP than just "a system running Linux".

Please, can we have some journalistic integrity? The misuse of the term "Linux" to refer to any of thousands of programs that may or may not be installed on a particular system is just meaningless. In this case, it's very misleading.

(Log in to post comments)

A new abuse of the Linux term

Posted Feb 25, 2006 15:26 UTC (Sat) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> Linux is the name of a program: an operating system kernel. This is a worm affecting PHP. In what way is this a "Linux worm"?

Well, it is hard to imagine a Linux worm that didn't involve more than just the kernel as services running on top of that kernel are typically what is exploited. This particular worm targetted Linux, it would not run on other systems that were running PHP so it can't really be called a PHP worm ... perhaps Linux/PHP worm?

I personally believe that it is a completely fair characterization to call this a Linux worm, but YMMV ...

jake