7 ms·

The fact that a majority of the comments are whining about the name really shows you the worst part about open source: the non-contributing but highly entitled

• jeremymcanally 6y ago
  “The loudest mouths are often attached to the idlest hands.” - ancient open source software proverb (It’s not ancient. I made it up. But it’s sadly true.)
  • goodpoint 6y ago
    It's very true and for a basic reason - one minute spent doing is one minute taken away from talking/writing. This is the reason why many excellent projects remain obscure while marketing-driven products become famous... and often take credit for other people's ideas.
• nps1 6y ago
  Or it just means the name does matter to vast user community. And you are hell bent on not listening to user community and not taking valid criticism.
  • dvt 6y ago
    No, @hnarn is right. And you don't really "get" this until you start maintaining an OSS repo (I speak from experience). For years, I was very critical of Linus Torvalds and his brusque attitude. Then I started a few moderately-popular OSS projects, and the entitled masses started pouring in. After a while, it's hard to refrain from telling people to just screw off.
  • macksd 6y ago
    I think this is one of those cases where one might say the customer (or user, in this case) is always right. But there are always customers who will just find something to complain about, and often (like when the product is a free community service) they're simply not worth having as customers. edit: Personally, I've been a heavy user and supporter of CentOS but I've almost never referred to it as CentOS. Because the point is to be binary compatible with RHEL, and it's then naturally almost the same thing as Oracle Linux and Scientific Linux, etc. So I would simply refer to "EL5" or "EL6" in code or other places. This probably won't be any different.
• duxup 6y ago
  It maybe shouldn't but it always amazes me by how much developers (assuming that is who they are) will subject other developers to the same bikeshedding and minutia type hassles ... that suck for everyone. It's all grounded human nature I'm sure, but man it is terrible. We all are frustrated by that behavior ourselves, why do it to other people?
  • mumblemumble 6y ago
    It's even more fundamental than human nature. Bikeshedding is better understood as an emergent behavior of groups of people than it is a thing that individuals do. Bikeshedding-type comments come to dominate conversations because they take less time and effort to compose and express, and therefore tend to get in ahead of and (especially in a synchronous communication medium) crowd out more substantive contributions. While the expertise and temperament of the individual conversation participants may be contributing factors, the dominant one is simply the size of the group.
    • duxup 6y ago
      Yeah the effort issue is huge. I was reading some discussion where someone was writing some part of a website for a product. They chose a framework and the whole thing was spammed with 'why does it have to be x' type contributions. No help, no technical discussion, just these empty one off sentiments spewed at the person who has to actually do the thing. It was just sad.
• tus88 6y ago
  What's wrong with the name? It seems fairly uncontroversial to me.
  • eggman314 6y ago
    In some contexts rocky is synonymous with unstable or unreliable, so I assume that's the issue some people have.
    • CivBase 6y ago
      Really? My first thought was the "Rocky Mountains" which seem like an apt metaphor for something slow, stable, and rock-solid. The logo even looks like a mountain peak. My second thought was Rocky Balboa... but I figured that probably wasn't right.
      • mongol 6y ago
        I think if you are not native English-speaking, your first thought will be the Italian stallion. At least, that is what I first think of.
  • b0rsuk 6y ago
    It can also be associated with a 'rocky ride'. The name doesn't bother me in the slightest.
    • nobody9999 6y ago
      > It can also be associated with a 'rocky ride'. The name doesn't bother me in the slightest. Or with Rocky Road[0]. Tasty, tasty Rocky Road. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_road_(ice_cream) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_road_(ice_cream)
• nertzy 6y ago
  It’s pretty funny that anyone would complain about a Linux distribution being named after a developer’s given name. I mean, it’s Linux.
  • wwright 6y ago
    Debian also did this.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Fnoord 6y ago
      Irony being they (Ian and Deborah) split up, Ian quit Debian and worked for Sun (arguably a competitor back then), Docker, ..., and unfortunately committed suicide. The good news? Debian's still going strong.
      • gremlinsinc 6y ago
        This sounds like a Halt and Catch Fire spinoff.
    • jabbany 6y ago
      I feel like this is a fact that's much less well known :) (Debian is actually a portmanteau of Deb(ra) + Ian...)
• ignoranceprior 6y ago
  I'd just like to interject for a moment. I'm confused why everyone is complaining about the "Rocky" part, which is a nice tribute and sounds pretty decent, when the actual problem is the "Linux" part. It should really be called "Rocky GNU/Linux", or "Rocky GNU+Linux", because the Linux kernel is only one component of a complete GNU-based operating system compatible with the POSIX standard.
  • awill 6y ago
    I guess we found Richard Stallman's hacker news account.
    • sabas_ge 6y ago
      It's part of the notorious copypasta https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Interjection https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/Interjection
  • na85 6y ago
    I'm so tired of this drivel. It's called Linux because GNU is awful at naming things. The name "Gahnoo" is too awkward to pronounce and "Gahnoo plus Linux" is too long. People shorten names for convenience. Deal with it or come up with a better name than GNU.
    • boomboomsubban 6y ago
      First, obvious troll is obvious. Second, complaining that the "GNU" part is awkward to pronounce when it's a regular English word unlike Linux amuses me. Linus Unix to Linux will forever haunt free software.
      • _hyn3 6y ago
        Right, infamous copypasta... forgive the pedantry, but the English word "gnu" (referring to the mammal) is pronounced "noo", while the non-English word "GNU" is pronounced "gah-noo"[0], as OP correctly pointed out. 0. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/pronunciation.en.html
• em500 6y ago
  I share your disappointment. Out of 150+ comments so far, I believe there has not been a single technical comment about the actual work involved in building a version-pinned RHEL clone. Without any experience myself (beyond some kernel build maybe 10 years ago), I gathered (from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8 https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8) that the majority of work involves manually de-branding the RHEL sources. This apparently can't be automated, as it requires human judgement in which packages/files de-branding is required and in which it might actually break something. Between major version jumps, e.g. from RHEL/CentOS 7->8 there's apparently also lots of work in getting the build environment up to date. This raises numerous interesting questions, such as: 1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/ https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones? 2. Where / what are CentOS's actual build scripts / tools? Is there some howto or writeup how to make a CentOS iso (or cloud-image) on my own PC after downloading the source tree? 3. Do CentOS devs go through the entire manual de-branding exercise with every minor/major update? Presumably they are using some sort of automation/scripting/diffing somewhere. Are these processes/tools available or documented anywhere? I hope at some point someone with some actual knowledge about this can chime in.
  • soperj 6y ago
    >1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/ https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones? How'd they used to do it then? I assume they just became a subscriber? Edit: just thought about it, couldn't they get them from CentOS? Would be pretty funny.
    • em500 6y ago
      From what I understand[1], up to RHEL6, Red Hat released their sources on public ftp, but after that they became customer/subscriber-only. I would have thought that the GPL ensures that the customer can then freely redistribute them, but I've read that companies can still make that option very unattractive through other means (e.g. terminating the customer contract, mingling sources with proprietary stuff and making them hard to disentangle). I don't know if RH is playing such games, but the complete lack of non-gated RHEL7 and 8 source code on the web gives some strong hints. edit: relevant thread: https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky/issues/4 https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky/issues/4 [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/603865/ https://lwn.net/Articles/603865/
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• wayneftw 6y ago
  Pffft. Imagine coming to a forum where people commonly give their opinions only to accuse them of "whining" and "entitlement" when they simply give an opinion that you don't like. As if questioning whether a project name is any good suddenly equates to an application to be an "idea guy" or a logo designer. If you don't like the majority opinion about something as trivial as a name, stop visiting this forum. Does that advice sound familiar? Perhaps it doesn't feel fair for someone to offer you only one of 2 extremes? Hmmmm. The last thing this forum needs is another open source warrior patronizing everyone for participating here.
  • goshx 6y ago
    how meta
  • boogies 6y ago
    Down to death your comment goes. That’s what you get for complaining about complaining about complaining about the name. Because obviously complaining about complaining adds much to the discussion, while complaining about those complaints about complaining draw away from it⸮
• mkovach 6y ago
  Don't know if it has been mentioned, but the name Rocky is from Rocky McGaugh, co-founder of CentOS. He passed away and they named the new effort after him.
• anonunivgrad 6y ago
  First impressions and names matter. As much as we don't like it, human beings are irrational and emotionally driven. There's nothing wrong with discussing a name.