Objective of IFSO Re: [Fsfe-ie] stuff from the past week [adelaney at cs.may.ie]

[Ciaran O'Riordan]

> Justin Mason wrote:
> > What about adopting the reasonably inclusive "free/libre and open
> > source software"?

Personally I prefer "Free Software", but I don't mind the term FLOSS.
For an org, FLOSS lacks clarity, definition, and a set of authorative
judges.

Free Software has a clear definition and authorative judges.  It also
has a wealth of FAQs and documentation on www.gnu.org, and a bunch of
hardcore dedicated people to work with.

People can disagree with the judges (like I do re:GFDL), but the
judges give a good default to fall back on in case of disagreements.
Like at the last meeting, there was a multi-way disagreement over what
we should demand from e-voting software, I argued against demanding
fully Free Software, but after 10 minutes, we agreed that since we
were the Free Software movement, we would by default demand fully Free
Software.  My opinion got thrown out, and we got on with other work.
Brilliant!

I hope there aren't people that will not help us block software
patents or get Free Software into schools just because we don't use
their terminology.  The usefulness of this type of person is
questionable anyway.  The goal isn't to make everyone happy all the
time, it's to give computer users the freedoms they deserve.

-- 
Ciaran O'Riordan - http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/