Debian: some people just don't get it

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 21:49

Opinion and Analysis

It was interesting to see the comments which Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols made about the Debian project recently. Interesting, because they resulted in a rejoinder from a Debian developer, Thaddeus Black - not a particularly prominent person in the project, not the leader. No, just one of the rank and file, he thought that Vaughan-Nichols' comments merited a response and submitted a very reasoned bit of prose.

You'd have to wonder why Vaughan-Nichols made what were at times incorrect and at other times naive comments about Debian. Was he playing the troll? Or was he genuinely unaware of the naivety of some of what he wrote?

For instance, he made a comment that he found it stupid that the Debian had renamed Firefox as Iceweasel, Thunderbird as Icedove, and Seamonkey to Iceape. A little bit of digging would have resulted in him finding out that there are genuine copyright reasons for this. For example, in the case of Firefox, (and here I quote): ... "the Mozilla Corporation has asked us to stop using the name "Firefox" in our version of Firefox, unless we use the fox on a globe logo. We can't use the logo because its copyright license is not free. Even if somehow we could do this, they want to vet every patch we apply before we release a package called Firefox containing it." See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=354622 and http://ze-dinosaur.livejournal.com/12083.html

This kerfuffle over copyright does not in any way mean that Debian includes older versions of these packages as Vaughan-Nichols has stated.

If some other journalist who writes on and off about Linux and other FOSS software had made these statements, it wouldn't bother me. Or for that matter, I doubt if any Debian developer would have bothered to respond. But Vaughan-Nichols has a dedicated site called Linux-Watch and it isn't often that he makes errors of this nature.

Of course, he, like many other tech journalists, has this obsession about Linux: that every distribution should start aping the commercial ones. The distribution which every one of these writers sees as the standard is Ubuntu which follows the Gnome desktop and releases every six months. The fact that Ubuntu is a project set up by a commercial entity escapes this mob.

And many of these writers would love it if Linux spread far and wide on the desktop for it would undoubtedly improve their status too; maybe they are tired of continuing to write about a fringe operating system even after all these years.