[lug] Initial impressions of Kubuntu

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 03:18:59AM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:

> Watch out down the road... Debian is on their high horse (not for me to 
> decide if rightly so or not, just saying...) about Firefox and 
> Thunderbird trademark issues.  They ended up changing the names of the 
> packages that contain them in the next version.  I forget the new 
> names... but they're headed downhill sometime from "unstable" at some point.
> 
> 
> Ice-something...?  Bah, memory is the first thing to go.  :-)

I don't see this as a problem.  I actually prefer that they do things on
principle even if it harms them short term.  I know there is room for both
kinds of thinking (basically: the Linus pragmatic thinking vs. the RMS
idiological thinking) but you have to admit that the idiologues are important.

Look what happened just this week with Sun using RMS's license to open Java.
Talk about vindication... RMS has always said: we'll never accept your
language unless it meets our idiological definition of free, and look who
caved.  RMS and the idiologues are long-term thinkers.  If something harms
their movement for a week, or a month, or a year it doesn't matter to them.
What matters is the principles, and the faith I suppose is that those
principles will win out in the long term if you are true to them.  I think the
track record is fairly good that this view is correct in the realm of
general-purpose software.