A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
Posted Apr 7, 2023 17:18 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by anton
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla
The English word <free> /friː/ still has multiple meanings, including "without cost" and "without restriction".
However! When we use words that have two (or more) meanings, people will tend to assume the meaning that makes the most sense to them.
Software is lifeless and mindless in the same way as a freshly cooked lunch, a bottle of filtered pasteurized beer, or a housebrick.
Software is frequently an article of commerce.
"Software that costs zero dollars" is therefore the most plausible automatic disambiguation of the term "free software" for anyone who is not deeply immersed in the liberty-focused discourse of the Free Software movement.
Posted Apr 11, 2023 15:51 UTC (Tue)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (8 responses)
If, as nye claims, these days not a single English-speaking person in the world understands "free software" as being related to freedom without extra explanation, and that, as many claim, the only intuitive meaning these days is "software without cost", then the meaning of "free" in English has changed indeed.
You point to the fact that software is frequently an article of commerce, and that may be the cause for the "without cost" meaning. But it seems to me that software is not more frequently an article of commerce than four decades ago, and we now have a free software ecosystem that should help with understanding what "free software" means.
Posted Apr 11, 2023 16:44 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (7 responses)
....Intuitive?
That significant numbers of people (at the time) understood and bought into it doesn't make it "intuitive"; it just means that those folks had it explained to them "enough" for them to buy into it.
To the average person, software user, and even "developer", "free software" means "software without cost" -- the only ones who would ever think differently are those who had alternative meanings explained to them.
RMS still had to explain himself back then, and he's _still_ explaining himself to this day..
Posted Apr 11, 2023 17:34 UTC (Tue)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (6 responses)
It may be that non-developers these days will indeed think of software without cost when they hear "free software", after all they are not directly confronted with the freedom aspects of software, and in their contact with various commercial software (even if some of it is free software) the commercial interests run against making them aware of that.
Software developers have more interaction with software, and they do more thinking about software. For them the freedom aspect is closer to home, although maybe the powers that be have indeed managed to make it unintuitive to everyone. But that was not the case four decades ago.
Yes, even four decades ago there were people who needed the freedom aspect explained to them, and RMS has done that. But not everyone. I certainly never thought that "free software" means "software without cost".
Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:04 UTC (Tue)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
I came of age during the BBS/"shareware" era. I didn't have access to, or even any awareness of, "Free Software" (of the RMS sense) until _after_ I had first been exposed to Linux in the mid 90s. To me and my peers, "free software" meant "zero-cost" -- along the lines of freeware or shareware, and to the rest who only had to use software as a tool (or entertainment) "free software" was a more charitable way of saying "warez".
These days, with Linux just being a hidden implementation detail [1], I'd postulate that the overwhelming majority of software folks (and software-adjacent) folks are very aware of "Open Source", and if they're aware of the term "Free Software" at all, most consider it to be synonymous with Open Source. When they think of it differently, it's along the lines of "those out of touch communist zealots who think we shouldn't even be allowed to charge for (or be forced to otherwise give away) our valuable software" [2]
[1] It's just another app you install from the windows store so you can run (predominantly) third-party black-box kubernetes/docker/etc containers locally when you're trying to develop "for the cloud".
Posted Apr 11, 2023 18:24 UTC (Tue)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
But if I had encountered the term without the explanation attached, I hazard that I would likely have defaulted to the "as in beer" interpretation.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:16 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (3 responses)
Is this because the term was immediately preceded or followed by some explanatory context? Most of us here probably first came across it in the context of something like this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. Here, the FSF starts off by defining what "free" means - because they correctly recognise that without that explanation, nobody will understand what they mean. This is the norm anywhere that the phrase is used unless it's intended specifically for an audience that's already familiar with the culture.
Or are you claiming that you first encountered it in a more general sentence like "we could use free software for this", or "we should release this as free software"? Because if that's the case, and you claim to have correctly understood the phrase, I would contend that either you are not a native English speaker, or your memory is in error.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 12:18 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Posted Apr 12, 2023 17:57 UTC (Wed)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (1 responses)
I am not a native speaker, but I don't think that plays a role: If I had encountered a lot of usage of "free" as meaning "no cost", that would be what I would (also) associate with that word, just like I learned that "terrific" has a positive meaning.
By the time I encountered "free software" I had read many thousands of pages of English books (including 1984) and other texts, and the proportion of "free" used as meaning "without cost" was vanishingly small (including in 1984). I did have some exposure to commercials through magazines like Byte, but certainly less than a native speaker, and I would have to dig up these old issues and see if there was much usage of "free" with that meaning there.
Posted Apr 12, 2023 18:42 UTC (Wed)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
In the very next paragraph, you make statements which make me think that it very much played a role; it sounds like the English-language material to which you were exposed was not representative of a native speaker's daily exposure to the English language.
Four decades ago it was still intuitive that "free software" meant something other than "software without cost", as evidenced by the fact that RMS used the term and a significant number of people got it easily enough to support the cause.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
I don't think that the term would have been as successful as it was if it had not been intuitive for many people; maybe not the majority, but certainly a significant number.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
[2] Which isn't accurate or fair, but as the saying goes, perception is reality.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla
I don't remember where I encountered it, but I remember that I never had the need for a realignment of the meaning.
A quarter century of Mozilla
A quarter century of Mozilla