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Renaming of Ion3 in Debian

User discussion about Debian Development, Debian Project News and Announcements. Not for support questions.

What name should Debian use?

Poll ended at 2007-05-14 12:23

Union (both "un-ion" and a pun on what is actually a "fork")
8
26%
Fission (pun on a particle "breaking up")
10
32%
Radical (pun on "radical ion" + managing the root ("radix") window)
0
No votes
Ion3-deviant (play on Debian + variant and the idea that modified versions are broken)
0
No votes
Iceparticle (following an established trend...)
13
42%
 
Total votes: 31

Message
Author
lexual
Posts: 2
Joined: 2007-05-08 02:03

#21 Post by lexual »

Being a derived work, it's obvious that the intent in "union" etc. is to refer to the original work.

You know, I can always modify the license for future releases to not allow any particular name you choose. (It's not trademark-only.)

Or I could make it closed source, but I thought Ion3 would be my final gift to the FOSS herd, that it can never hope to repay. After that I'll be sticking to writing closed source -- perhaps for Windows. The FOSS herd simply isn't worth my work.
tuomov,
As a user and non-developer, can I start by saying thanks for your great WM. I do hope you continue to contribute to open source in the future.

I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about trademark, copyright, etc.

I do have a question though.

Is limiting any word matching *ion* really fair given that:

>>$ grep ion /usr/share/dict/british-english | wc
4237 4237 54330

>>$cat /usr/share/dict/british-english | wc
98326 98325 929603

I make that to be roughly 4%.

I do hope that whichever name that is chosen does not have the unfortunate negative connotations of iceweasel.

Cheers,

Lex.

tuomov
Posts: 10
Joined: 2007-05-07 19:57

#22 Post by tuomov »

As a user and non-developer, can I start by saying thanks for your great WM. I do hope you continue to contribute to open source in the future.
There's little hope of that. By now it's quite apparent, that FOSS only works as long as you "go with the herd" -- the herd that guided by its ideology, controls the powerful distributions that define what software is easily available, and what it looks like. The herd that does not even try to negotiate and resolve the larger issues at hand (the degradation of *nix into a clusterfuck of steaming crap), but rather forks (silently or not) whenever authors don't go with the herd.

I'm not with the herd.
I do hope that whichever name that is chosen does not have the unfortunate negative connotations of iceweasel.
I do hope that it does.

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chrismortimore
Posts: 849
Joined: 2007-04-24 06:34
Location: Edinburgh, UK

#23 Post by chrismortimore »

DeanLinkous wrote:The rest of the thread is a good read also.
Not what I would call it. But I'm sure from that thread, you can tell what my views were.

I vote Ion should be removed out of principle. But I refuse to enter a flame war on an open thread, so PM me if you really want to know why.
Desktop: AMD Athlon64 3800+ Venice Core, 2GB PC3200, 5x320GB WD 7200rpm Caviar RE2 (RAID5), Nvidia 6600GT 256MB
Laptop: Intel Pentium M 1.5GHz, 512MB PC2700, 60GB 5400rpm IBM TravelStar, Nvidia 5200Go 64MB

thamarok

#24 Post by thamarok »

Lion

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Pobega
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#25 Post by Pobega »

tuomov wrote:
As a user and non-developer, can I start by saying thanks for your great WM. I do hope you continue to contribute to open source in the future.
There's little hope of that. By now it's quite apparent, that FOSS only works as long as you "go with the herd" -- the herd that guided by its ideology, controls the powerful distributions that define what software is easily available, and what it looks like. The herd that does not even try to negotiate and resolve the larger issues at hand (the degradation of *nix into a clusterfuck of steaming crap), but rather forks (silently or not) whenever authors don't go with the herd.

I'm not with the herd.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't quite understand what you mean about the FOSS herd. I originally thought you were upset about Debian taking too long to upload Ion fixes (New versions with bugfixes), but apparently it has become more than that. Could you please explain (Here or in a PM) what gets you angry about the FOSS community? Again, I'm probably missing something quite obvious.
Jabber: pobega@gmail.com
Pronunciation: Poh - Bay - Guh

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DeanLinkous
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#26 Post by DeanLinkous »

I say we call it Tuo :D
Aye, fight and you may fail, sellout, and you may live, a while. And dying in your MScash beds, you'll be willin' to trade ALL the cash, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may FUD our customers, but they'll never take...OUR FREEDOM!

tuomov
Posts: 10
Joined: 2007-05-07 19:57

#27 Post by tuomov »

Pobega wrote:Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't quite understand what you mean about the FOSS herd. I originally thought you were upset about Debian taking too long to upload Ion fixes (New versions with bugfixes), but apparently it has become more than that. Could you please explain (Here or in a PM) what gets you angry about the FOSS community? Again, I'm probably missing something quite obvious.
You may thank the Arch Herd for the license change: they were the last drop. I will not have my work corrupted with Xft patches, and still be called by the name of my work.

If the herd wants support for the pile of crap called Xft in something called Ion, they should fix distributions and fontconfig [1]. Until then, I'm boycotting it. But that is unlikely to happen -- no, the herd can not accept that FOSS sucks, that their mighty heroes have created a load of crap that makes life hard for those that don't go with the herd -- those who want clear crisp unblurred fonts.

And, besides, Linux (and consequently *BSD as well) is generally turning into such a clusterfuck of steaming crap [2], that I'm unlikely to be using it for much longer. And on Windows, nobody gives a rat's ass whether the software is FOSS or not.

Any reasonable distributor that simply wants to distribute supported versions of my software instead of (silent) forks and ancient unsupported versions, should have no problems with the additional terms. But Debian has never been reasonable.

---

It's a sad state of affairs that you actually need to add such terms, because people don't otherwise have the courtesy of communicating with the author how he'd like the software distributed, and instead silently fork and distribute unsupported development snapshots in megafrozen distributions.

It's a sad state of affairs when essential core software is created and adopted in the following fashion:

Developer: "I just created this crappy font system/user space device hack/whatever according to a tunnel vision, the worse-is-better fallacy, and several misjudgements."

Herd: "Oooh! Shiny! Let's adopt it!"

And once the herd is content, the ad hoc hack never gets fixed, as the fallacy would promise. GNU/Linux is a clusterfuck of such decisions.

[1]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2006/03/17/T20_15_31/
[2]: http://iki.fi/tuomov/b/archives/2007/04/01/T19_09_22/

ecc
Posts: 1
Joined: 2007-05-08 12:33

Re: Renaming of Ion3 in Debian

#28 Post by ecc »

[quote="benh"]Feel free to write-in additional suggestions. If there's a really good name, I reserve the right to pick that and disregard the poll results.[/quote]

I suggest particle-man ( http://www.tmbg.org/band-info/songs/lyr ... anSTD.html )

plb
Posts: 468
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Location: NYC

#29 Post by plb »

I don't think I've ever seen tuomov in a good mood :D

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DeanLinkous
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#30 Post by DeanLinkous »

plb wrote:I don't think I've ever seen tuomov in a good mood :D
That IS his good mood... :lol:
Aye, fight and you may fail, sellout, and you may live, a while. And dying in your MScash beds, you'll be willin' to trade ALL the cash, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may FUD our customers, but they'll never take...OUR FREEDOM!

ksandstr
Posts: 2
Joined: 2007-05-07 14:28

#31 Post by ksandstr »

Whatever you call it, _please_ don't go with anything that's got "WM" at the end. That's plainly retarded, like "PCLinuxOS".

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llivv
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#32 Post by llivv »

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Last edited by llivv on 2019-02-17 05:05, edited 1 time in total.

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Pobega
Posts: 833
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Location: New York

#33 Post by Pobega »

tuomov wrote:
Pobega wrote:Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I don't quite understand what you mean about the FOSS herd. I originally thought you were upset about Debian taking too long to upload Ion fixes (New versions with bugfixes), but apparently it has become more than that. Could you please explain (Here or in a PM) what gets you angry about the FOSS community? Again, I'm probably missing something quite obvious.
You may thank the Arch Herd for the license change: they were the last drop. I will not have my work corrupted with Xft patches, and still be called by the name of my work.

If the herd wants support for the pile of crap called Xft in something called Ion, they should fix distributions and fontconfig [1]. Until then, I'm boycotting it. But that is unlikely to happen -- no, the herd can not accept that FOSS sucks, that their mighty heroes have created a load of crap that makes life hard for those that don't go with the herd -- those who want clear crisp unblurred fonts.

And, besides, Linux (and consequently *BSD as well) is generally turning into such a clusterfuck of steaming crap [2], that I'm unlikely to be using it for much longer. And on Windows, nobody gives a rat's ass whether the software is FOSS or not.

Any reasonable distributor that simply wants to distribute supported versions of my software instead of (silent) forks and ancient unsupported versions, should have no problems with the additional terms. But Debian has never been reasonable.
It isn't Debian's responsibility to have the newest version of your program in it's stable branch though. If the user wants new features it is his/her responsibilities to read the changelogs for newer versions of their favorite package, or to submit bug reports to the package maintainer.

The package maintainer's job is to, quite obviously, maintain the Debian package. It is not your responsibility to say anything besides "I do not support Ion *.*.* anymore, contact the package maintainer or ugprade".

As for Arch Linux, that seems a bit irresponsible on their part; But again, it is not your responsibility to troubleshoot and support problems created specifically and individually by distributions.

It's a shame that the FOSS community is losing someone who I personally consider to be insightful and smart, I enjoyed your window manager in the time I used it. Maybe you'll rethink your opinions, but I understand that GNU/Linux isn't for everybody.

Good luck in whatever path you choose.
Jabber: pobega@gmail.com
Pronunciation: Poh - Bay - Guh

tuomov
Posts: 10
Joined: 2007-05-07 19:57

#34 Post by tuomov »

llivv wrote:It seems to me (repeating myself here) that there is much more of a user push towards gui tools where (user) doesn't have to have a clue.
GUI tools are not the problem; the problem is the tunnel vision of GUI -- or more appropriately, WIMP GUI -- tools, as well as other things (such as blurred fonts), without regard for anything else. This results in what could be described as an ethos of "either you're one of us (developers), or an idiot user". The progression of different levels of users between those extremes -- and users with different needs, that still need to use the same software -- is forgotten and abolished: there becomes a noticeable "expertise gap" (cmp. "wealth gap"). FOSS no longer stands for choice, for there is no choice in ever more complex systems unless your expertise is at the level of a developer (of that particular piece of software), or at least a professional system administrator.

[I should admit that Ion is also far from perfect, and too complex. However, different standards should be applied to such marginal alternatives, as to core system and other essential software that practically everyone has to use -- the only alternatives being so drastic as Windows.]

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llivv
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#35 Post by llivv »

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Last edited by llivv on 2019-02-17 05:07, edited 1 time in total.

benh
Posts: 8
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#36 Post by benh »

tuomov wrote:Any reasonable distributor that simply wants to distribute supported versions of my software instead of (silent) forks and ancient unsupported versions, should have no problems with the additional terms. But Debian has never been reasonable.
I have no intention of causing Debian to distribute ancient or heavily modified versions. However, I cannot in good faith promise to package and upload new versions within a specific time limit (and neither can any other maintainer, since there are other constraints on updates to the archive). So Debian cannot accept your trademark licence. Thus I am forced to make a much large modification than any of the existing patches, to change the name of this package.

benh
Posts: 8
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Re: Renaming of Ion3 in Debian

#37 Post by benh »

ecc wrote:
benh wrote:Feel free to write-in additional suggestions. If there's a really good name, I reserve the right to pick that and disregard the poll results.
I suggest particle-man ( http://www.tmbg.org/band-info/songs/lyr ... anSTD.html )
You know, I thought of that but I forgot to put it on the poll.

trey
Posts: 119
Joined: 2005-06-09 17:47

Re: Renaming of Ion3 in Debian

#38 Post by trey »

WHY CANT WE MOVE IT TO NON-FREE FFS

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jobezone
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#39 Post by jobezone »

Chose fission, but I like the man. Just hope his ideas get contagious among the FOSS development people.
The Debian Documentation website contains the FAQ, Installation Manual and the Release Notes for Etch. They're helpful if you want to learn more about debian!

tuomov
Posts: 10
Joined: 2007-05-07 19:57

#40 Post by tuomov »

benh wrote:I have no intention of causing Debian to distribute ancient or heavily modified versions. However, I cannot in good faith promise to package and upload new versions within a specific time limit (and neither can any other maintainer, since there are other constraints on updates to the archive).
There are ways around that, provided by the license:

* You could distribute packages that include the version in the name, and something like "may be out-dated" in the one-line description shown by e.g. apt-cache search.

* You could have the package display a notification that it may be out-dated (with dialog, or whatever is usually used).

* You could have the package (or install tools) actually check whether there's a new release (from Debian's site and mirrors, preferrably), and only notify then that the package is out-dated. I think this would generally be a good system to have, to notify of possible security issues etc., that have not yet been fixed. (Didn't Debian promise to take care of these promptly?)

You see, there are very reasonable ways to comply. The user just heard of Ion and installing it (by simply typing 'apt-get install ion3' without thinking about it), must just be let to know that the version is old and unsupported, so no point in coming to complain to me, just like with significantly changed versions. Apt-get etc. are sometimes too easy and convenient: that's the problem.

Edit: You could also make the out-datedness notification use a dead man switch. In its crudest form, if the package is more than 28 days old, it starts complaining. A more refined form would check (unless the user has disabled this) some listing on Debian's site for the dead man bit.
Last edited by tuomov on 2007-05-09 07:11, edited 1 time in total.

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