Speaking of credits...

Speaking of credits...

[Jonathan Briggs]

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I was poking around on www.namesys.com and looked at your Reiser4 page,
where Lindows is listed as a supporter.

Y'all need to update that to Linspire, these days.
-- 
Jonathan Briggs
jbriggs@esoft.com

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Re: Speaking of credits...

[Clifford Beshers]

No, the name of the company is still Lindows (although it has changed 
from Lindows.com, Inc. to just Lindows, Inc.)  It is just the product 
and website names that have changed.

However, I have been reading the various threads about credit with 
interest and thinking about the plagiarism/rebranding issues.  I don't 
have time at the moment to write at length, but I would like to say that 
changing the name of something is not necessarily done for the purposes 
of stealing.

We who are steeped in Unix/Linux lore do not usually have a problem with 
the names developers come up with for their software, but many novice 
users do.  Hell, given a raw list of KDE applications I still would have 
trouble telling you what half of them did.

On the other hand, it really is a lot of tedious work to rebrand things 
and it usually ends up confusing things.  Changing the title of 
something with an obscure name still leaves you with a package name that 
is obscure, etc.

Fortunately, KDE added a generic name feature, so that apps can have a 
``kool'' name like ``kooka'', but also a secondary name like ``Scanning 
Tool'' that will optionally show up in menus and titlebars.  This is 
saving us a lot of effort because this is usually sufficient for people 
to figure out what is going on.

So, when we at Lindows change the name of something, we do it explicitly 
to try and reduce confusion for the user who may never even have heard 
the name Linux.

Case in point:  I'm removing lilo and putting in grub right now.  Grub 
puts up its name and version number on the top of the boot screen.  I 
can just imagine Michael trying to explain to Walmart, ``Umm... yes, 
GRUB stands for Grand Universal Boot Loader...''  Uh hunh.

At one point I proposed to our marketing department that we start the 
equivalent of the IMDB for Open Source Software, seed it with 
high-quality biographies of some of the best known people and open it up 
for developers to submit more content.  Then we could put links in every 
app to that website so that people could find out the history of the 
appications and developers.  Everyone liked the idea, but unfortunately 
the key would be to have some level of professional editing going on and 
that is hard to maintain.

I suppose in the end we'll all just end up on some credits page that 
scrolls by at OS shutdown at three times the pace that anyone can 
actually read, just like in the movies...

Cliff

Jonathan Briggs wrote:

>I was poking around on www.namesys.com and looked at your Reiser4 page,
>where Lindows is listed as a supporter.
>
>Y'all need to update that to Linspire, these days.
>  
>

RE: Speaking of credits...

[Burnes, James]

I'm working on a 'creditsd' daemon that runs in the background and acts
as a "broker" between applications that want to publish credits and
applications that want to sample them.

Basically creditsd exports and API that makes it possible for teams and
individuals that contributed to a subsystem to make themselves known to
people and other applications that want to know.  It does it "out of
band" so that it doesn't affect performance and gets around the problem
of the credit's being invisible at some application layer that calls a
lower layer.  What if a kde app calls the reiserfs mkfs tool?  Credits
will be invisible even though they are not intended to be.

The credits deamon will accept credit registration at either package
install time or run time.

Credits displays and access methods which can include screensavers,
install attractors, perhaps a kde ioslave called credits:, maybe
something in /proc), will have the option of looking at the credits of
either all installed apps, all running apps, or some selection of those,
perhaps sorted by various process criteria, package install date or
whatever.

It will be up to the credits display program and the user to decide how
much credits they want to watch, how fast, how quietly etc...

The credits access methods could be installed as a /proc or a ioslave
etc which should take the distro re-branding craziness out of the game.

Well the idea is a little loose right now, but perhaps a little more
innovation and a little less "legislation" is what we need right now.

Should be fun.  I'm going begin the prototype this weekend.

jim burnes
security engineer
great-west, denver
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Clifford Beshers [mailto:clifford.beshers@lindows.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 4:08 PM
> To: Jonathan Briggs
> Cc: Reiserfs mail-list
> Subject: Re: Speaking of credits...
> 
> No, the name of the company is still Lindows (although it has changed
> from Lindows.com, Inc. to just Lindows, Inc.)  It is just the product
> and website names that have changed.
> 
> However, I have been reading the various threads about credit with
> interest and thinking about the plagiarism/rebranding issues.  I don't
> have time at the moment to write at length, but I would like to say
that
> changing the name of something is not necessarily done for the
purposes
> of stealing.
> 
> We who are steeped in Unix/Linux lore do not usually have a problem
with
> the names developers come up with for their software, but many novice
> users do.  Hell, given a raw list of KDE applications I still would
have
> trouble telling you what half of them did.
> 
> On the other hand, it really is a lot of tedious work to rebrand
things
> and it usually ends up confusing things.  Changing the title of
> something with an obscure name still leaves you with a package name
that
> is obscure, etc.
> 
> Fortunately, KDE added a generic name feature, so that apps can have a
> ``kool'' name like ``kooka'', but also a secondary name like
``Scanning
> Tool'' that will optionally show up in menus and titlebars.  This is
> saving us a lot of effort because this is usually sufficient for
people
> to figure out what is going on.
> 
> So, when we at Lindows change the name of something, we do it
explicitly
> to try and reduce confusion for the user who may never even have heard
> the name Linux.
> 
> Case in point:  I'm removing lilo and putting in grub right now.  Grub
> puts up its name and version number on the top of the boot screen.  I
> can just imagine Michael trying to explain to Walmart, ``Umm... yes,
> GRUB stands for Grand Universal Boot Loader...''  Uh hunh.
> 
> At one point I proposed to our marketing department that we start the
> equivalent of the IMDB for Open Source Software, seed it with
> high-quality biographies of some of the best known people and open it
up
> for developers to submit more content.  Then we could put links in
every
> app to that website so that people could find out the history of the
> appications and developers.  Everyone liked the idea, but
unfortunately
> the key would be to have some level of professional editing going on
and
> that is hard to maintain.
> 
> I suppose in the end we'll all just end up on some credits page that
> scrolls by at OS shutdown at three times the pace that anyone can
> actually read, just like in the movies...
> 
> Cliff
> 
> Jonathan Briggs wrote:
> 
> >I was poking around on www.namesys.com and looked at your Reiser4
page,
> >where Lindows is listed as a supporter.
> >
> >Y'all need to update that to Linspire, these days.
> >
> >

Re: Speaking of credits...

[Lamont R. Peterson]

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On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 15:07, Clifford Beshers wrote:
[SNIP]
> Case in point:  I'm removing lilo and putting in grub right now.  Grub 
> puts up its name and version number on the top of the boot screen.  I 
> can just imagine Michael trying to explain to Walmart, ``Umm... yes, 
> GRUB stands for Grand Universal Boot Loader...''  Uh hunh.

See http://www.gnu.org/directory/grub.html :
GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader
[SNIP]
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont@gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. http://www.GuruLabs.com/

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Re: Speaking of credits...

[Clifford Beshers]

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Sloppy of me.  Sorry.

Lamont R. Peterson wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 15:07, Clifford Beshers wrote:
>[SNIP]
>  
>
>>Case in point:  I'm removing lilo and putting in grub right now.  Grub 
>>puts up its name and version number on the top of the boot screen.  I 
>>can just imagine Michael trying to explain to Walmart, ``Umm... yes, 
>>GRUB stands for Grand Universal Boot Loader...''  Uh hunh.
>>    
>>
>
>See http://www.gnu.org/directory/grub.html :
>GRUB stands for GRand Unified Bootloader
>[SNIP]
>  
>

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Re: Speaking of credits...

[Lamont R. Peterson]

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On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 16:07, Clifford Beshers wrote:
> Sloppy of me.  Sorry.

NP :-).

Given that this thread was concerning the renaming of projects/products,
I did not want someone to come along and wonder if the acronym for GRUB
was being renamed by the Lindows people, which I was sure from your
message it was not (at least, not at this point).
-- 
Lamont R. Peterson <lamont@gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. http://www.GuruLabs.com/

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Re: Speaking of credits...

[Jonathan Briggs]

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Oh, okay.  Sorry about that, then.  I clicked on the Lindows logo and it
redirected me to Linspire with a spiffy new Linspire logo on the page. 
I just assumed it had been a global search and replace.

On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 15:07, Clifford Beshers wrote:
> No, the name of the company is still Lindows (although it has changed 
> from Lindows.com, Inc. to just Lindows, Inc.)  It is just the product 
> and website names that have changed.
[snip]
> 
> Jonathan Briggs wrote:
> 
> >I was poking around on www.namesys.com and looked at your Reiser4 page,
> >where Lindows is listed as a supporter.
> >
> >Y'all need to update that to Linspire, these days.
> >  
> >
> 
-- 
Jonathan Briggs
jbriggs@esoft.com

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Re: Speaking of credits...

[Clifford Beshers]

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The icon *is* out of date and I've asked marketing to send a new one.

Jonathan Briggs wrote:

>Oh, okay.  Sorry about that, then.  I clicked on the Lindows logo and it
>redirected me to Linspire with a spiffy new Linspire logo on the page. 
>I just assumed it had been a global search and replace.
>
>On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 15:07, Clifford Beshers wrote:
>  
>
>>No, the name of the company is still Lindows (although it has changed 
>>from Lindows.com, Inc. to just Lindows, Inc.)  It is just the product 
>>and website names that have changed.
>>    
>>
>[snip]
>  
>
>>Jonathan Briggs wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I was poking around on www.namesys.com and looked at your Reiser4 page,
>>>where Lindows is listed as a supporter.
>>>
>>>Y'all need to update that to Linspire, these days.
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>

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