"Georg C. F. Greve" greve@gnu.org writes:
<big><bold> Why we speak about Free Software
What is this coding? It reminds me of what that nasty MS mail client does.
In many languages, the ambiguity of the term "free" does not exist. It may in others, including English, but that is easy to avoid by pointing out that free refers to freedom, not price.
Please don't burn me for saying this: the ambiguity *does* exist in English, so we who speak in English *must* modify our language in order to communicate our points clearly. Personally, I prefer the term "Software Freedoms" as an accurate translation of our aims into modern English... is that acceptable to FSFE?
|| On 06 Sep 2001 10:49:48 +0100 || MJ Ray markj@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk wrote:
<big><bold> Why we speak about Free Software
mr> What is this coding? It reminds me of what that nasty MS mail mr> client does.
I don't think it has any real name, I just wanted to prepare things as pure ASCII and found this to be the most intuitive way. Had I known that this would look like a MS mail client, I might have avoided it. Since I never used one of them, I wouldn't know, though.
In many languages, the ambiguity of the term "free" does not exist. It may in others, including English, but that is easy to avoid by pointing out that free refers to freedom, not price.
mr> Please don't burn me for saying this: the ambiguity *does* exist mr> in English, so we who speak in English *must* modify our language mr> in order to communicate our points clearly. Personally, I prefer mr> the term "Software Freedoms" as an accurate translation of our mr> aims into modern English... is that acceptable to FSFE?
Software freedoms are what constitutes Free Software. I don't know whether people would understand that we are talking about a kind of software if we made "Freedoms" the subject.
Regards, Georg