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Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders


From: Martin
Subject: Re: Truth matters when writing software and selecting leaders
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:07:01 +0000

On 3/29/21 12:26 PM, Jean Louis wrote:
* Martin<smartin@disroot.org>  [2021-03-29 13:57]:
 From the paragraph above, I can see you did not get the difference
between the free software and open souce. And your analogy is not
right. You mentioned price not freedom.
I know that gnu definition and in general I'm on your site here, but unfortunately besides us and other small groups of geeks the "free software" term just sounds too general in my opinion. People in supermarkets while choosing some free stuffs in promotions usually are not thinking about freedom. Besides freeware software like facebook (with all its network, cloud services, etc) gives you also some kind of freedom of socializing with other ppl in their platform. In general facebook is not only about price, they control almost every aspect of human lives around the globe including people who are not using their apps directly. Some random person by just reading the gnu header that "free software is better than open-source" could easily misinterpret it as facebook being not so bad only because it's not open-source.
We use the word "free software" to clearly refer to freedom, we may
use words such as libre software to refer to freedom.
Libre is just more blurred spanish, french,... translation of the word "free" redefined by GNU. So the core issue with this confusing term is still not resolved.
We do not use "open source" as that is vague term, and does not
necessarily mean "free software". The distinction is more and more
important today.
Ironically the word "free" is much more vague then "open-source". The problem I mentioned above is that "free software" unfortunately could also mean freeware for too many people who are not professional English linguists nor IT specialists.

Moreover definition of "free software" is not mentioning about importance of https://reproducible-builds.org/ nor http://bootstrappable.org/ which should be in the highest priority for any RMS/FSF/GNU/Free organization to finally address pathological issues like: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2007-11/msg00091.html




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