Re: [Fsfe-uk] Liberated software

[Chris Croughton]

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 04:01:14PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> I remember a book about the English language which looked at
> various pairs of words where we had one from Anglo-Saxon and
> the other from Norman French. (_Not_ the old Ivanhoe example 
> about animals and meat names. Perhaps by Simon/Simeon Potter?
> It was a long time ago.. ) Anyway, it reckoned that often the 
> Anglo-Saxon one was seen as more basic and fundamental, and 
> the Norman French one as more of an abstract. Brotherhood and 

"Bare is one's back without a brother behind it."

> fraternity was one example.

Secret handshakes?  None of those in programming, surely.  Oh yes, the
MS protocols...

> "Dedicated freedom-lovers broke into the server farm to liberate
> cooped-up programs from an existence of solitude and misery, and the 
> programs will be carefully released into appropriate parts of
> the net where they may breed freely and produce new free software"

LOL!  Sounds like something from William Gibson.

> I'm not sure this is a helpful comparison, but I'm afraid it is
> the first thing I thought of.

Yes, indeed.  And it's also the sort of thing certain of the 'warez'
people might do in the name of "free software" (it would provide them
with a kind of legitimacy).

Chris C