A. Dehqan, man of inquiry Posted Tue, 24 Nov 2009

Due entirely to the efforts of one inquisitive and indefatigable A. Dehqan, a web search for the phrase "In The Name Of God The compassionate merciful" now almost exclusively turns up hits to a wide variety of free software mailing lists, forums, and IRC channels with questions on everything from what is a kernel (in a minimum of half a line, no less), to how to send a FAX, to the intersection between Islam and copyright and much more! I've now run across in five distinct projects. Maybe you have too!

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Awesome find, Mako! :) Although, if you fix the bad grammar and put a "the" before "merciful" you do get mostly Islam-related results as expected for that phrase. Still very much worth your blog post!
Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz at Tue Nov 24 13:01:55 2009
Ah, the fine line between "religious" and "religious nut".  Somehow, I think putting a statement like that at the top of your emails falls firmly on the "nut" side.  (Putting it in your email signature at least makes the issue ambiguous.)

Reminds me of all the 419 spam I get, much of which starts out with similar phrases; makes it a lot easier to identify unwanted mail, since nobody I actually want to talk to would open a mail that way.
Posted by Anonymous at Tue Nov 24 13:06:58 2009
Neat find!

(Also: anonymous troll is anonymous)
Posted by Paul Kishimoto at Tue Nov 24 13:53:48 2009
That's really nice, good find. In fact, this should be a sign for people who keep offending religion believers in the free software community that the goal is about spreading freedom and free software regardless the religious stuff and the offending people and their beliefs for no worth reason doesn't help the movement.
Posted by Osama Khalid at Tue Nov 24 14:12:18 2009
That's funny, Mako.
Posted by Marcello Semboli at Tue Nov 24 15:29:46 2009
Possibly my comment came across as anti-religious, in which case I apologize.  I did not intend it as such.  I merely meant to make a distinction between religious people and zealots; I don't consider the two equivalent, though I know of people who do.  I know a lot of very intelligent people who practice religion, and those people exemplify their beliefs through their actions as decent, moral human beings.  I also know people who wear their religion on their shoulder, make sure you know about it, and consider it their mission to proselytize everyone they meet; I find that those people tend to not actually do a very good job living up to their own values.
Posted by Anonymous at Tue Nov 24 18:04:14 2009
Well, adding free-software symbols on my personal laptop isn't very crazy, right? I do that.

For me, adding religious symbols also shouldn't be crazy if someone believed that religion leads them to, as you mentioned, human, moral life. Really, free software is a very great idea, but the religion is also even more important for many people in the free software community. So there should be no conflict, no religious offending, like no sexism!
Posted by Osama Khalid at Wed Nov 25 11:37:10 2009
I totally agree Osama! A wonderful thing about free software is the way it's able to cross many of these boundaries. Free software advocates are certainly in no a poor position to criticize people for being zealous advocates and evangelist and certainly would be well served by being tolerate of different opinions and passions. :)
Posted by Benjamin Mako Hill at Wed Nov 25 11:57:43 2009

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