Please forget to FLOSS
<p>In email to a third party, copied to me, Linux activist and long-time friend Rick Moen comments on the acronym FLOSS (usually explanded &#8220;Free, Libr&eacute;, and Open Source&#8221;.</p>
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I continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids.  We learned in the late 1990s a number of lessons about how <em>not</em> to market free / open source, and the idiots who keep coming up with bad ideas like &#8220;FLOSS&#8221; and &#8220;FOSS&#8221; are determined to rush, like urban-legend lemmings, off the very cliff of PR incompetence that we so painfully learned to <em>finally</em> avoid, a decade ago.  I&#8217;m sorry, but those people need to be cluebombed and routed around until they stop shooting at everyone&#8217;s feet.
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<p>I couldn&#8217;t have put it better myself, so I&#8217;m not going to try.</p>
<p>Near as I can figure, the only appeal this term has is a sort of lily-livered political correctness, as though people think they&#8217;d be making an ideological commitment that will cause petulant screaming from a million basements if they pick &#8220;open source&#8221; or &#8220;free software&#8221;.  </p>
<p>Well, speaking as the guy who promulgated &#8220;open source&#8221; to abolish the colossal marketing blunders that were associated with the term &#8220;free software&#8221;, I think &#8220;free software&#8221; is <em>less bad</em> than &#8220;FLOSS&#8221;.  Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery. </p>
<p>Rick adds:</p>
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The problem with [FOSS and FLOSS] isn&#8217;t merely that that they sound like goofy nutjob organisation investigated by Emma Peel and John Steed. Worse, it is that neither term can be understood without first understanding <em>both</em> free software and open source, as prerequisite study.</p>
<p>That isn&#8217;t merely gross marketing failure; it&#8217;s a semantic black hole that sucks marketing into it, never to be seen again. It&#8217;s a finely executed study in nomenclature incompetence &#8211; and I can&#8217;t help noticing it&#8217;s promoted by, among others, the same crowd who were doing such a masterful job of keeping free software an obscure ideology prior to 1998.
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<p>Er.  Yes.  Quite&#8230;</p>
