Max Moritz Sievers mms@fsfe.org writes:
There is no need to say GNU OS
Sometimes I find it useful because if you don't explicitly tell people you're talking about an OS, they will think you're talking about "tools and libraries" or "GNU userland".
it is absurd to say Torvalds started "Linux"
Wikipedia will continue to say some absurd things for almost as long as society says them :-/ If Wikipedia existed two millenia ago, there would have been an "Is flat vs. is round" flame war on Talk:Earth for at least a decade.
Even if you "win" the Wikipedia argument this month, the argument would probably start again in the near future. For a long term solution, we have to continue educating free software users. Here're a few paragraphs that RMS posted recently on this topic: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-users-never-heard-of-gnu.html
And he talks about it in the transcript I recently posted: http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#gnu-and-linux
But I don't know what to say to them after all these discussions.
I'm no expert, but from similar discussions here are some principals I find useful:
1. Be as concise as possible. Try to sum the argument up in two or three sentences. If you use twenty sentences, they will pick the weakest one and ignore your good points.
2. Try to keep the discussion short. If you are responding to someone who made twenty points, pick the one or two most important ones and ignore the others (for now at least). If the discussion becomes long, no new people will join in because they won't have enough time to read the existing discussion - or people will join in but will repeat things that have already been said, so the discussion will just go in circles.
3. If there are multiple issues, separate them. If you try to explain to someone the two points of why the name of the OS should be changed, and why the description should be changed at the same time, they will reply about the one that they feel strongest about or the one that they have the best arguments about. If you take them one at a time, the discussion will be more focussed and there will be fewer opportunities for the other person to change the topic if they realise their contradictions are being exposed.
I find that RMS has become quite good at rebutting logically flawed arguments. He has decades of experience. Here are transcripts of 14 of his talks, plus some other transcripts where you might find good arguments or styles: http://ciaran.compsoc.com/texts/