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gandhiano / technology-degrowth

Looking at digital technology under the lenses of hacktivism and degrowth
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Shortly distinguish free vs open source software #4

Closed gandhiano closed 8 years ago

gandhiano commented 8 years ago

There are obviously differences, which should be made clear.

Also related to #3, where it might be interesting to consider if we talk about free software movement, or rather FOSS/FLOSS.

pierreozoux commented 8 years ago

I like the term FLOSS, and I think, the first time you use it, you can give a quick definition linked to the article you mentioned.

gandhiano commented 8 years ago

Reopening, as I find this the position/approach of the liberal (and pro-guns) ESR and the OSI in regard to free software (negative/pejoratively seen by business, therefore open source as "better" language to communicate with the establishment) as a relevant aspect of the narrative. ESR and colleagues saw it as a problem not only because of the ambiguity of the meaning of "free", but also because of how it was seen by the establishment.

It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term free software' had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the fact that the wordfree' has two different meanings in the English language, one suggesting a price of zero and one related to the idea of liberty. Richard Stallman, whose Free Software Foundation has long championed the term, says Think free speech, not free beer'' but the ambiguity of the term has nevertheless created serious problems -- especially since mostfree software'' is also distributed free of charge.

Most of the damage, though, came from something worse -- the strong association of the term `free software' with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear it to an MIS manager.

In conventional marketing terms, our job was to rebrand the product, and build its reputation into one the corporate world would hasten to buy.

From "The Revenge of the Hackers"

pierreozoux commented 8 years ago

What are:

gandhiano commented 8 years ago
gandhiano commented 8 years ago

I'm closing this again, as there is no space to develop this argument further, due to character limitations of the book chapter (#10). It might be interesting to further explore this in future developments of the document though.