The return of the Unix wars?

Posted Apr 27, 2012 17:41 UTC (Fri) by cjwatson (subscriber, #7322)
In reply to: The return of the Unix wars? by Seegras
Parent article: The return of the Unix wars?

We called ourselves simply Ubuntu at least in part because the founding team of developers had differing views on whether we'd prefer to be Ubuntu Linux or Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and we felt that keeping it simple would be less of a distraction. That's never implied trying to avoid association with Linux or anything of the kind; even if it happens not to be on the front page right now, it's hardly hidden, starting from the "About Ubuntu" page and our release announcements and moving on from there.

The return of the Unix wars?

Posted Apr 27, 2012 20:00 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't do this very often, but I'm going to pull rank.

As the world's leading critic of all things Canonical...
I really don't understand why Canonical gets picked on for this particular issue of high level branding. I've probably engaged in it as well at some point in the past. And to the extent that I've done it or encouraged other people to do it, I apologize. On examination, it's a highly irrational and subjective criticism which has been shown cannot be fairly applied.

For example Debian currently doesn't list "linux" on its top level homepage and bills itself as the universal operating system. I don't see the hand wringing over that choice of branding. Not everyone is thrilled with the complexity of Debian offering bsd and linux kernels, but noone is really making it a point to beat them up about choosing to downplay their important role as a "linux" distribution ecosystem.

So with that said, what I believe is happening is that such criticism is generally misdirected frustration over other aspects of the Ubuntu/Canonical/community relationship that a person is having trouble identifying and communicating.

-jef

The return of the Unix wars?

Posted Apr 28, 2012 11:29 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

Yes, some of us dropped the GNU/Linux part from Debian stuff in some parts since the introduction of GNU/kFreeBSD in a stable release. Earlier announcements talked about "Debian GNU/Linux", whereas this changed with the release of squeeze:

'Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.8 released'
'Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" frozen'
'Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.1 released'

This started shortly (Aug 6) after I more or less started a discussion on the German IRC channel (Aug 3). This was then also retrofitted on 5.0 update announcements:

"Updated Debian 5.0: 5.0.9 released"

I think it is important for a project that runs on multiple kernels to not mention one kernel on the homepage and not the others. The removal of Linux from various places is correct in the Debian case.

The return of the Unix wars?

Posted Apr 28, 2012 0:26 UTC (Sat) by paravoid (subscriber, #32869) [Link] (1 responses)

While I still remember the times when Ubuntu was marketing itself as "Linux for human beings", I too see nowadays a pattern of people trying to identify Ubuntu as something different from a Linux distribution.

Take for example this (random, not representing Canonical nor Ubuntu afaik) guy:
http://randall.executiv.es/know_your_names

"Ignore for a minute that Ubuntu is not "linux", any more than your friend's Toyota Camry is a 2AZ-FE."

The return of the Unix wars?

Posted Apr 28, 2012 0:34 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

for a short time there was a growing trend in midset that Ubuntu == Linux. That would be a bad thing (just as bad as the prior trend that Red Hat == Linux). Nowdays I don't see any $distro == Linux mindset, and I think that's a good thing.