OLS: Enforcing the GPL

OLS: Enforcing the GPL

Posted Jul 26, 2004 13:56 UTC (Mon) by greve (subscriber, #8385)
In reply to: OLS: Enforcing the GPL by minichaz
Parent article: OLS: Enforcing the GPL

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.

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