OSNews

There's this idea that if you change the words people are supposed to use, they will think differently. For example, if we call retarded people "special", we will think positively of them. Of course it doesn't work that way. "Special" now has the same connotations as "retarded" does (and "retarded" itself was originally an intentional euphemism).

Anybody who cares knows the origins of the different parts of the OS. They know Linus and friends make the kernel and the FSF makes the core userspace utilities and libraries and X.org makes the windowing system, etc. They don't need to say GNU/Linux to remind them. For those who don't care, saying GNU/Linux is no more enlightening than just saying Linux. They don't care about different OS components, maybe they don't even understand how an OS works. Perhaps they don't even care about politics at all. To them, having to say "GNU/Linux" is just more work (both in typing and in speaking). But more to the point, saying "GNU/Linux" doesn't actually tell you anything about who did what. Unless you already know about the internal structure of the OS, you would have no idea what GNU or Linux actually referred to. And if you already knew about the structure of the OS, you would already know that GNU makes the userspace and Linus makes the kernel.

And most importantly, it's just a name. A real travesty would be if somebody actually claimed that Linus and friends made the entire OS. That would be factually incorrect. Furthermore, there are plenty of names that stick around that aren't fully technically correct but have a history or some other reason for their existence. If you go into /dev you will see nodes like tty0, etc. We don't use teletypes anymore. For that matter, we don't really use true old-fashioned terminals anymore. Yet the names remain. They're convenient, everybody understands them and the names don't have to be changed with every new way of implementing terminals as technology changes. And we call computers "computers", not "Von-Neumann Binary Digital Programmable Computers" even though the latter is technically correct (and there are computers that aren't programmable or that don't follow the von-neumann architecture or aren't digital, etc.). Nobody gets up in arms about making people say that mouthful just because it's technically correct and gives credit to Von Neumann. That would be pedantry. Why the zealots can't see that forcing people to say "GNU/Linux" is also worthless pedantry is beyond me. But Linux zealots are really in a class by themselves when it comes to getting up in arms over the most pointless of things.