"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.