Bertalan Fodor wrote: > > On the new website, I'm following the previous website > > which simply wrote "LilyPond". Does anybody want to make > > a strong case in favor of replacing this with "GNU/LilyPond" > > everywhere? > > > > (or maybe just once or twice, in the intro or something like > > that?) > > I hope nobody. For a potential user, the term GNU is > incomprehensible.
I think that's exaggerated. It's kind of like the D.C. in Washington, D.C. Most people don't know what it stands for, and nobody *ever* guesses correctly. On the surface, it seems completely unrelated to the city, the country, the capital, anything. You either know it or you don't. And if you don't, you look it up and say, "huh". All the same, it's the official name. GNU is what it is. It's not Unix, and if putting GNU on our homepage gets a tiny fraction of people a tiny bit more curious about free software, that's not a bad thing, IMO. Perhaps some people will be turned by a strangely pronounced word, but they'll eventually come back when their friends and colleagues eventually convince them that GNU LilyPond is not just an anachronistic image. We shouldn't be ashamed of our GNU heritage. I don't think GNU is incomprehensible, it's just self-referential, programmer style. PHP is another good example, it used to stand for something reasonable, but then they *officially* changed it to stand for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. It's like foo and bar, and hello world, and counting from 0. Programmers have a culture of quirks, and self-referential acronyms are par for the course. Some GNU-friendly GNU-package webpages: http://www.gnu.org/software/3dldf/LDF.html http://www.gnu.org/software/anubis/ http://aspell.net/ Plenty of GNU projects unabashedly keep the GNU in their title. GCC - GNU Compiler Collection GCL - GNU Common Lisp GIFT - GNU Image Finding Tool GIMP - GNU image manipulation program GLPK - GNU Linear Programming Kit GLUE - GNU Links Users Everywhere GLib - GNU library etc. Maybe we should start calling it GnilyPond... or maybe we should put a picture of a gnu cooling off at a lily pond. By the way, do you know what most people guess D.C. to stand for? Da Capital. Seriously. We either know it or we're hopeless. - Mark _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
