Why Eric is doing this [LWN.net]

Why Eric is doing this

Posted Jul 1, 2005 22:33 UTC (Fri) by rknop (guest, #66)
In reply to: Why Eric is doing this by BrucePerens
Parent article: ESR: 'We Don't Need the GPL Anymore' (O'ReillyNet)

And sometimes he does RMS-bashing for no reason I can understand. He did a paper a while back purporting to prove that many more people said "Open Source" than "Free Software". It seemed to me to be picking a fight with no productive purpose.

That does seem pretty gratuitous -- although I would say that there is purpose in the difference. I seem to remember a few years ago you came out with a statement that was widely quoted that we need to talk more about freedom.

The problem with the term Free Software is that, alas, in English it is ambiguous. Our commercialized society thinks of cost before freedom, and so thinks that Free Software means Freeware. And, indeed, I frequently see "Freeware and Shareware, like Linux and..." quoted in news stories, which is very unfortunate. Open Source is, in that sense, less ambiguous, because it is a term that doesn't have the same pre-defined associations with it of being misinterpreted

The meaning behind the term Free Software is something we need to talk about more... and we need to talk about why freedom is practical, and it's not just all philosophy. (In my experience, I generally regret it when I've found myself tied to some proprietary system or another. The University I'm at has gotten bitten again and again by being tied to proprietary systems for various different things (course management, applications, etc.), but nobody seems to have made the connection that avoiding all proprietary systems altogether might be part of the answer.

-Rob

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Why Eric is doing this

Posted Jul 4, 2005 14:15 UTC (Mon) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

"Open source" is a slightly akward term. That means that the listener is more likely to think that there is a defintion to it, much as "Shareware" is an akward term that the listener is likely to think has a defintion.

"Free Software," on the other hand, sounds like like "free software" without the capitalization. It can be used in a sentence without referring to anything in particular. "The store was giving away free software." Very different from "Linux is Free Software," but before we can talk about what Free Software is we have to get accross the barrier that there *is* a difference between zero-cost software and Free Software.

If, on the other hand, you say, "This software is Open Source," or similar, it's a little more obvious that there's a jargon term embedded in there.

By the way, I do not post all this to denegrate Free Software, or to say that Open Source is a better term! We do, however, need to recognize the challenges that come with the terminology, and admit when the Free Software term has more challenges than the Open Source term.

If I have to choose a camp, I put myself in the "Free Software" camp. I want the freedom. I value it for philosophical reasons, yes, but also very crass practical reasons-- just not the ones that ESR proposes. I don't know if it really is such a more efficient model for producing software that we don't even need to talk about Freedom. I value the freedom, and as a *user* I've been bitten in the past by lock-in issues assciated with non-Free software. I like the term. I just wish the English language were less ambigous about the term, and that marketing blitzes in the USA hadn't all but convinced people (called "consumers" if you're into marketing) that zero-cost is the be-all and end-all meaning of "free" when you're talking about anything other than speech.

-Rob

"Freedom software" anyone?

Posted Jul 5, 2005 20:16 UTC (Tue) by stfn (guest, #30357) [Link]

"Free Software," on the other hand, sounds like "free software" without the capitalization.

Since Free Software is defined in terms of freedoms granted to the user perhaps we should start calling it "freedom software".

As jimi wrote above, "software does not need the GPL, we do" and "It's not the software that's free; it's you". One doesn't think of price these days when hearing "free people" (although the many eyes make shallow bugs argument suggests FOSS gets developer effort at no charge, i.e. "free developers").

I only wish "freedom software" didn't remind me so sharply of the laughably jingoistic term "freedom fries" coined by an anti-French, pro-war contingent in the U.S.A.

"Freedom software" anyone?

Posted Jul 8, 2005 16:03 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I only wish "freedom software" didn't remind me so sharply of the laughably jingoistic term "freedom fries" coined by an anti-French, pro-war contingent in the U.S.A.

For anyone who may have missed the subtleties of the "freedom fries" issue, it is my impression that it was a joke. Perhaps a mean-spirited one, but intended to make people laugh nonetheless, and was never used in a serious sentence. It was a satire on the anti-German renamings from WWII, which I think were actually serious. The most famous of these was the renaming of "sauerkraut" to "liberty cabbage."

Present day U.S. culture is full of light-hearted satire about a supposed enmity between the U.S. and France.

"Freedom," incidentally, is well-used buzzword in U.S. politics for adding likability to almost anything you say. In the 1980's, there were people in El Salvador doing much the same thing that the folks the U.S. is fighting in Iraq are doing today. To gain support for them, the U.S. president referred to them as "freedom fighters."

In any case, I agree that when I hear "freedom software," my first reaction is that some kind of linguistic subterfuge is going on.

"Freedom software" anyone?

Posted Jul 11, 2005 22:19 UTC (Mon) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

Sadly, it was taken more seriously than that. Several restaurants actually renamed fries on their menu, as did the restaurants and snack bars at the House of Representatives. At that time, and now, my own impression was that the people taking these actions were pretty serious about making a statement of protest, rather than a joke. See the wikipedia article.

Like other folks, I wish "free" meant only one thing, and like others I have thought about calling it Freedom Software, but I too have the same reservations. My current hopeless hope would be that we could end up calling it Libre Software.