Re: GNU/Windows

[Christopher Faylor <cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 01:12:56PM +0900, J. Grant wrote:
>I agree with your postion on calling a Linux system GNU/Linux.  Have you
>considered using the name GNU/Windows when refering to machines that use
>the RedHat Cygwin UNIX envoroment?  This would be good publicity for
>the GNU tools that are installed on Windows machines. Also it would make
>it well known that many Windows machines use GNU software for shell
>scripting and other tasks supported by the Cygwin enviroment.

I don't see how naming is really anyone's decision but Red Hat's.  We
own Cygwin.  Certainly Cygwin owes a lot to the GNU tools from FSF but
we are not going to be renaming the distribution because of that.  I
think it would be confusing to refer to it by two names.

Even if that was not the case, we can't use the word "Windows" in this
connotation since there are, arguably, trademark issues with doing that.
We used to use the term gnu-win32 but were asked to change.  I think
that part of the reason was that we don't want to use the word "win"
with relation to Windows.

Finally, to follow your analogy, the name would be GNU/Cygwin anyway,
not GNU/Windows.  Cygwin is equivalent to Linux in this scenario.

cgf

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