[clue-talk] [ANN] Bantam: a lightweight file manager for X11

[Matt Gushee]

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> Matt Gushee wrote:
> 
>>[*] Well, I guess that one is a real African word, but I still say its
>>    usage by a British software company is pretentious.
> 
> The distro was founded by Mark Shuttleworth's company Canonical.
> Shuttleworth was born in Africa, so it's probably not so pretentious as
> you suggest.

Okay, that makes me feel better about the name Ubuntu. Still, I think 
the larger point remains that there are a lot of commercial concerns 
that don't care much about the meaning or implications or heritage of 
the words they use, as long as they draw customers. And, I guess there's 
a difference between reckless borrowing of foreign words (as I thought 
Ubuntu might be) and making them up out of thin air (Avaya, anyone? or 
Agilent? or anything ending with -ent?); still, both seem to me 
symptomatic of a moral vacuum in contemporary capitalism, in which 
companies have no real purpose except to grow. So of course I try to 
avoid being like that.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA