Re: [Fsfe-uk] AFFS web site

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 02:19:55PM +0100, Chris Croughton wrote:
> It is, and it's one I think should be dropped unless hackers really want
> to be labelled as geeks and weirdos.  Along with the -P suffix and other
> injokes, it is fine when used only within the community but used in
> public it becomes a marker and an excuse to not take programmers
> seriously, especially in legalistic documents.

I would accept that argument, except that I don't think it's that important.
As the kind of 'strict' definition of Free Software, yes, of course it is
important. But, I wouldn't use the list in that manner talking to people
anyway.

Thinking about how I explain it when talking to a group of people, yes, I 
do call them the "four freedoms", and I do say "first freedom, second
freedom, etc.". I don't use the zero in that sense. I do also call them
by name, though - "the FSF calls this Freedom 0", for example. More like
a noun than an ordinal. This tends to make more sense, because I usually
present them out of order (0, 2, 1, 3 :) just to be difficult :o)

I don't know. I understand the argument, but even if we did label them 1-4
I wouldn't expect people to read/understand the point from that list. That's
why there's a friendlier definition of Free Software on the front page.
I treat it as a definition rather than a description, and as such it makes
little difference to me. I certainly haven't encountered problems with '0'
in speaking circumstances, but I also don't think that proves anything about
the written word, so..

Personally, I think the argument of consistency is pretty strong. I also 
don't see that it does (any) damage, and therefore wouldn't be willing 
to fix what I don't percieve as broken. I would prefer, for example, that
people reply to the DTi consultation on "OSS" as a default exploitation
route for publically funded software than argue here about whether to 
start numbering schemes from 0 or 1 :)

Of course, feel free to prove me wrong about the damage thing. If it is 
a problem, I'm not so stuck in my ways that I wouldn't change. I just don't
see the problem.

Cheers,

Alex.