OLS: Enforcing the GPL [LWN.net]

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 26, 2004 9:50 UTC (Mon) by minichaz (subscriber, #630)
In reply to: OLS: Enforcing the GPL by stockholm
Parent article: OLS: Enforcing the GPL

The free/Free misunderstanding is a purely English thing. English happens to have one word that means free as in beer and free as in freedom. Most languages have two different words for these meanings. French for example has "gratis" for free as in beer and "libre" for free as in freedom.

Anyone know the situation in German? Anyone know of another language that has one word for both these concepts?

Thanks.

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OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 26, 2004 13:56 UTC (Mon) by greve (subscriber, #8385) [Link]

I can tell you that in German there are two words possible here: "frei" and "gratis".

- "gratis" is exclusively only ever used for zero price

- "frei" is clearly referring to freedom according to linguists, although
some forms of usage seem to provide exceptions to that rule, in
particular when used in collate words ("Freibier"), but not only
("freier Eintritt").

90% of the words you will find in *the* German language reference book
("Duden") are clearly referring to freedom, though -- so the situation
seems somewhat similar to French with "logiciels libre".

Both languages are making strong differences between price and freedom.

I know the same to be true for Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Korean, Japanese at least -- in fact English is the only language I ever encountered that was so weak on this aspect.

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 26, 2004 18:49 UTC (Mon) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

But I know of a case of a French to English translation of "libre" to "uncopyrighted". In no language does the equivalent of "free" mean "granting freedom" rather than "having freedom", with, as far as I know, the sole exception of "free speech", which is short for "freedom of speach" ("of" denoting type, not possession) and related to "speak freely". So other languages have what is probably a worse confusion, that the software has been granted self-determination as opposed to being owned by someone, which most easily suggests public domain.

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 29, 2004 8:24 UTC (Thu) by chepelov (guest, #23542) [Link]

Care to give the reference for that translation?

There is a corner case, though: the expression "libre de droits", which is more or less equivalent to public domain ("unobstructed by [intellectual property]rights"). But nobody without an intent of infrigement would seriously think of "logiciel libre" to mean "public domain software".

(now, mainstream press journalists, that's a different matter....)

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Aug 5, 2004 12:28 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

The original was French, and it was an (American iirc) Reuters translation.

So it was an English speaker who screwed up the translation ...

Cheers,
Wol