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Comment by barlo | Hacker News Reader

Golden Master - pretty much Apple's term for RTM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_master

Why Apple's term? I've heard that used with respect to PC games too.

He's not saying it's Apple's term exclusively, only that Apple prefers to call it Golden Master (GM) instead of Release To Market (RTM). It's not a copyrighted term by any means.

I wasn't implying that it was copyrighted, just that Apple isn't the only one using the term.

I'm actually really curious as to why people are down-voting me so much. Did I cross some invisible line? Are people interpreting my comments as some sort of attack or aggression?

I just made the observation that it seems misleading to call this "Apple's term" since they are not the only ones that use it. Note, that I'm not claiming that anyone is lying or trying to be intentionally deceptive. I'm not making some sort of "No! Apple didn't invent the term! They are non-innovators that steal everything!" comment. I'm just stating that it is a widely used term in the industry, and that calling it "Apple's term" might lead people who have never heard the term before to attribute it as some sort of Apple-specific jargon. Rather than not contributing to the conversation in a meaningful way by just down-voting the parent because I think that he/she is wrong, I just posted a minor correction in the interests of correctness/completeness.

[I can't even believe that I need to specify these things in such excruciating detail lest someone on HN feels that I'm being an asshole by trying to attribute my emotional state to a block of text rather than just reading it for what it is. Really, HN? I thought that we were better than this.]

(Meta comment, only because you asked for it at length) To my mind, you're being needlessly pedantic and argumentative. It is Apple's choice of term. Why the comment, "Why Apple's?"? Isn't it obvious that the comment was responding to a question about Apple? It seems like a needless attack on the author, who was providing useful information.

If you'd left the comment with just the interesting part, "I've heard that used with respect to PC games too," you would probably have stayed at 1, possibly gone up to 2.

Because you asked: I did not initially downvote your comment. However, as the asker of the question, I understood the phrase "Apple's term for RTM" was just a compact way of saying, "the term used by Apple for the concept some others call RTM". I did not detect any implication in that wording that "Golden Master" was uniquely or primarily or even originally Apple's term.

But you read those more specific implications into the statement. Out of two ways to read the answer, you chose the less-charitable interpretation: that the writer was making a stronger claim, and misleading people. In that sense, I can understand downvotes as trying to send the message: read charitably, assume the best-possible-interpretation of comments, and save your corrections/clarifications for things that are wrong under all interpretations, not just one strict interpretation. Otherwise we get crazy meta-tangents like this.

Finally, though, the 'dispute' (such as there is one) motivated me to actually read the Wikipedia article and Google ["golden master"] on both the web and old Usenet postings. It turns out the phrase is overwhelmingly associated with Apple, and perhaps Apple was the first to use exactly that term for a software release, in the late 80s. So the implication that it is an Apple-originated term may be appropriate, despite you having heard the term in other software contexts.

I think you're attributing ownership when the above poster is simply stating that it's something that Apple uses.

I speak English. It's my language. I certainly don't claim any ownership.

(I do find it a bit odd that I have to explain this...)

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