a long rebuttal to the Linux-is-the-engine fallacy

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 27, 2008, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distributions probably describe their
> operating systems as Linux-based in a feeble attempt to not offend
> people on either side of this insanity.

Right.  So, let's say, there's a dispute as to whether you or I wrote
the largest part of a book.  It's trivial to assess that you wrote an
order of magnutide more than I did, for your style is clear all over.
Still, I published it under my name exclusively, because I wrote the
closing chapter all by myself.

And then, when you bring up that you wrote the largest part of that
book, the publisher says that it's going to say it's an
AlexOliva-based book, "in a feeble attempt to not offend people on
either side of this" debate.

Would that even pass for an excuse, you think?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}