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Comment by r0naa | Hacker News Reader

Well, I think that it's a relevant analogy to what an operating system does. Like an OS a system of government (like Democracy) manages a collection of physical elements (institutions) and serves as an interface between those and the end-users (citizens.)

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That's a metaphor, and its confusing if not mildly infuriating.

A metaphor is a type of analogy, just so you know. Also, could you elaborate on what is so infuriating?

#1 An OS does different things, you might want DemocracyUI

#2 Its a technical term out of place that redefines what an OS does, as a member of the technical community feel a sense of ownership for a term that I routinely use. Its infuriating when you mess with something that is mine.

The kind of hardware we deal with it's called Congress. There's where the party we've built comes into place.

I was expecting a democratically run Linux distro or some kind of framework for democratically pulling open source software.

Its more confusing than infuriating. Mainly because the term os makes sense only to people like me, but doesn't match what up with what people like me know it as.

The OS part of the name doesn't help anything. I'm guessing its only there so you could have the name in the URL.

Agreed. Within the demographic that understands the acronym (OS=Operating System or Open Source, etc.), it's likely to be confusing. Outside the demographic, it's not useful as a metaphor because they don't know have an expansion for OS in their heads.

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