[vox] Reasons for caution when promoting FLOSS

Bill Ward bill at wards.net
Sat Jan 2 00:56:52 PST 2010


I understand why the term libre is being used, I just think it shows abysmal
lack of marketing intelligence to do so.

On Jan 1, 2010 7:39 PM, "Brian Lavender" <brian at brie.com> wrote:

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,...
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