A name for this OS

[Martin Cracauer]

Kelly Murray writes:
> 
> I guess SilkOS has been rejected?  I think the simple fact that it
> is something unknown will attract more interest than "LispOS",
> which many people will immediately reject as uninteresting or having
> already failed without looking further.  But if people don't agree this
> is a problem or issue, then "LispOS" is the best name in my opinion.

While I'm not against SilkOS, I think we have nothing to gain from
choosing a name that doesn't sound like Lisp.

Some Smalltalk vendors did this, dropping well-know names with
"Smalltalk" in it and choosing some random name. They thought that
this would weaken the impression that their product is primary a
programming language, instead that it is a nice <xxx> system that
happens to have a language inside and which language it is doesn't
matter and is not a primary thing the customer has to think
about. This is not what I want.

In my opinion, this approach places a product under the gazillions of
products for given problems that use some random, non-well-thought-of
home-grown language. Leaving out a language's language name out of a
products name this way makes sense for those who would like to pretend
that the user never uses the language anyway.

SilkOS isn't bad, but I wouldn't choose it for Kelly's reason.

> On a related note, I believe RMS has very much impedded our potential
> progress by the restrictions he has helped encumber upon
> an enourmous body of software in the world.
> I've always wanted to start a "Knu" project -- which is what Gnu should
> have been -- writing truly free software that can be used to serve
> the interests of everyone, both public and private, hacker and corporation.

I can only repeat myself that we should take a pragmatic way. Take
whatever lincense gets the most code written and keep parts seperate
where GPL people could come into conflict with others. If we're lucky,
those people work on different parts.

Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
http://cracauer.cons.org
Fax +49 40 522 85 36