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Again the 'slavery' non-sense.Again the 'slavery' non-sense.Posted Jan 20, 2012 12:06 UTC (Fri) by fb (subscriber, #53265)In reply to: Again the 'slavery' non-sense. by RobSeace Parent article: LCA: Addressing the failure of open source > You've never heard anyone use the word "slave" or "slavery" metaphorically before? It's a pretty widespread phenomenon... "I'm a slave to the grind!", "He's a slave to drugs!", "I've been slaving away at this drudgery all day!", etc... While that happens often in colloquial language, I've never seen it used like that in a consequent and purposeful manner in a formal setting. Words have meanings, and these meanings have consequences. Try purposefully and consequently associating a bad word (e.g. 'slaver', 'pig') with a given minority at work to see what happens. To me that is just the same cheap game of 'associate something you don't like with something that outrages people to get a bigger response' that is also played with 'think about the children'. Except this one is played by key FOSS advocates, associating 'proprietary software' with 'slavery'. Aren't this the same people who are so very careful when talking about word choice when it is to disambiguate 'intellectual property' and copyright and patents? Aren't this the same people who are always so careful about using GNU/Linux? > Do you also object to the naming of master/slave relationships between hardware/software? I can tell you, most sincerely, that I very much object such use. It appalled me the first time I read such language in a book (more than 10 years ago), and it appalls me still.
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Again the 'slavery' non-sense. Posted Jan 20, 2012 13:59 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]
> Try purposefully and consequently associating a bad word (e.g. 'slaver',
> 'pig') with a given minority at work to see what happens.
I have no idea why you keep bringing this strange analogy up... How is that in any way similar? What "minority" is being insulted here? The "minority" of proprietary software? I'm pretty sure that's like calling a white male a "honkey"; no one cares or is insulted, including the white male in question!
> Words have meanings
Yes they do, and I already pointed you to a dictionary documenting some of those collequial/metaphorical meanings as being well established and accepted by most people in the world...
> To me that is just the same cheap game of 'associate something you don't
And, here I somewhat agree with you... It's kind of silly, and surely there's a better metaphor... (The "rent vs. own" concept seems to work well...) However, at the same time, I also think it's silly to get all worked up over a commonly used term as if it were the most offensive thing ever uttered by another human being... It's not offensive in any way that I can see... It's just silly...
> I can tell you, most sincerely, that I very much object such use. It
Well, ok, at least you're consistent... But, I still find it somewhat crazy that anyone would take offense to such a commonly used term... As someone else pointed out, it strikes me as exactly as ridiculous as RMS going all super-offended about the modern use of "piracy"... Or, someone religious getting offended over calling background server processes "daemons"... Or, once we had a customer call in VERY offended that one of our error messages mentioned something about killing a child process; apparently, they had recently lost their child, and felt the error message was insensitive to their tragic loss... We also had someone call in to complain about a message that said a command was "invalid", because they read it as the noun form of the word, and they were disabled, so felt insulted by the message...
Again the 'slavery' non-sense. Posted Jan 20, 2012 14:55 UTC (Fri) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
> I have no idea why you keep bringing this strange analogy up... How is that in any way similar? What "minority" is being insulted here? The "minority" of proprietary software? I'm pretty sure that's like calling a white male a "honkey"; no one cares or is insulted, including the white male in question!
As I understand, the intended meaning of this comment is both that _users_ of proprietary software are 'slaves', as well as producers/sellers of such software are 'slavers'.
>> To me that is just the same cheap game of 'associate something you don't
> And, here I somewhat agree with you... It's kind of silly, and surely there's a better metaphor... (The "rent vs. own" concept seems to work well...) However, at the same time, I also think it's silly to get all worked up over a commonly used term as if it were the most offensive thing ever uttered by another human being... It's not offensive in any way that I can see... It's just silly...
I don't think this is silly, as we have a group determined to associate 'slavery' with a whole bunch of honest working people.
But I think we can agree to disagree on it.
Again the 'slavery' non-sense. Posted Jan 20, 2012 15:37 UTC (Fri) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]
> As I understand, the intended meaning of this comment is both that _users_
> of proprietary software are 'slaves', as well as producers/sellers of such > software are 'slavers'.
Yes... So, the "insult" (if you can call it that) is being directed at the sellers of proprietary software... I'm sorry, but I'm having a hard time viewing them as a downtrodden "minority" of any sort... The users aren't being insulted; they're being described as victims... At one point in history, perhaps calling someone a "slave" could be meant as an insult, but these days it's clearly meant to describe someone who is a victim of whatever is "enslaving" them, be it drugs, boring drudge work, or yes, proprietary software...
> I don't think this is silly, as we have a group determined to associate
Well, it's not like they just invented the metaphorical usage of the term... They are merely carrying on a similar usage that's well established... I don't think anyone takes the usage literally, and imagines that software makers are out there with whips beating their users and chaining them to desks or something... Everyone knows it's a metaphor, even if it's somewhat of an overblown, reaching one... As I said, it seems exactly equivalent to me to calling copyright infringers "pirates"... Both are outrageous metaphorical stretches of the original meaning of the words... But, neither seems worth getting upset about...
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