[vox] Reasons for caution when promoting FLOSS

[Brian Lavender]

You could be a little more considerate in your response. 

Unfortunately, English is ambiguous when it comes to the meaning
of "free".  Spanish doesn't suffer from this ambiguity (gratis vs
libre). Wikipedia has even devoted a page to this concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre

Considering that English uses a wide variety of adopted words and
the evolution of natural languages, I think it is appropriate acronym. We
use the root of libre in liberty and liberty, hence implying freedom,
not necessary "free" as in cost.

Below are additional sites that promote FLOSS or the term libre.

http://schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Try_FLOSS_Now
http://www.inapp.com/linux.php
http://libre.adacore.com/libre/

brian

On Fri, Jan 01, 2010 at 09:19:02AM -0800, Bill Ward wrote:
> Libre isn't even an English word.  FLOSS is a stupid acronym.
> 
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Brian Lavender <brian at brie.com> wrote:
> > Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)
> >
> > So, it seems that I see a lot of this.  "See, OpenOffice (OO) does all you
> > need. You don't need MS Word, WordPerfect, or whatever." But in the end,
> > OpenOffice can be a real pain. My recent experience with OpenOffice and
> > using its bibliography feature has been a real pain. The cost is that
> > I invested time into learning OpenOffice because I believed it could do
> > what I needed it to do. In the end, I am burdened with a tool that does
> > a poor job for the task.
> >
> > I believe we should keep this in mind when promoting FLOSS.
> >
> > brian
> > --
> > Brian Lavender
> > http://www.brie.com/brian/
> >
> > "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
> > it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
> > way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
> >
> > Professor C. A. R. Hoare
> > The 1980 Turing award lecture
> > _______________________________________________
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> > vox at lists.lugod.org
> > http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox
> >
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture