Re: lilypond vs. GNU/LilyPond

[Mark Polesky]

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