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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

Being German, I think rather differently (probably this is a different culture; US citizens might think differently) about this. Consider

    Sortix is a small self-hosting Unix-like operating system developed since 2011 aiming 
    to be a clean and modern POSIX implementation.

vs.

    Sortix is a clean and modern POSIX implementation.

If it isn't yet a clean POSIX implementation, the second one is a blatant lie to a potential user (which they will and should not forgive). On the other hand, the first one is quite honest in that is clearly tells what is there and the clear commitment to reach a clean and modern POSIX implementation - sounds fair and honest.

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I don't think BMW, with their slogan "The Ultimate Driving Machine", shares your notion of what it means to be German, then. Or even Volkswagen with "Das Auto", is it really the car, or just a car?

It'd be lying if he were to say "we have 100% POSIX compliance." Very few OS projects can claim that. It needs to also be version-qualified, as there are several POSIX standards and even Windows can claim compliance with some of the versions.

My point is that this information of the current state of the project does not belong in the introduction to the project. The fact that it is a Zero-Point-Something version number is information enough that the project is incomplete.

SpaceX "...DESIGNS, MANUFACTURES AND LAUNCHES ADVANCED ROCKETS AND SPACECRAFT". They don't add caveats about completeness or design flaws or anything of that sort in their introduction.

And my reduction is just a call-out. The introductory section of the site is three paragraphs and a sentence long. It's not an introduction at all, at that point. All of these extraneous details are specifically making the introduction less clear, not more.

> I don't think BMW, with their slogan "The Ultimate Driving Machine", shares your notion of what it means to be German, then.

Or maybe they understand that different marketing approaches are required in different cultures. The slogan BMW uses in German-speaking markets is "Freude am Fahren" (roughly, "driving pleasure", or to be somewhat more literal, "pleasure while driving"), which is a bit more modest than "The Ultimate Driving Machine".

So true. "The Ultimate Driving Machine" would rather be seen as confirmation of the "swaggerer image" that BMW sometimes has (and BMW is in my observation trying to get away from).

> I don't think BMW, with their slogan "The Ultimate Driving Machine", shares your notion of what it means to be German, then. Or even Volkswagen with "Das Auto", is it really the car, or just a car?

The slogan "Das Auto" for VW at least in Germany can rather be considered as a subtile hint that probably most Germans, when they think of a car, first think of a VW (hinting the deep interleaving of post-WW-II German culture and VW). At least that's what I see in this slogan.

Apart from this: There is a large difference between using "stupid" slogans (that can also be considered as something like mission statements) and claiming properties that simply are not there (fraud).

> The fact that it is a Zero-Point-Something version number is information enough that the project is incomplete.

Say, OpenSSL was 0.9 for many years and was at that time still highly stable and complete. There is a wide gap between "very incomplete" and "basically ready", so in my opinion 0.x tells nothing, except the developers still see things to be done.

Even Linux v1.0 has:

>> It aims towards POSIX compliance

in the readme

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