15 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
15 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
Please forget to FLOSS
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<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 “Free, Libré, and Open Source”.</p>
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<blockquote><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 “FLOSS” and “FOSS” 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’m sorry, but those people need to be cluebombed and routed around until they stop shooting at everyone’s feet.
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</p></blockquote>
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<p>I couldn’t have put it better myself, so I’m not going to try.</p>
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<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’d be making an ideological commitment that will cause petulant screaming from a million basements if they pick “open source” or “free software”. </p>
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<p>Well, speaking as the guy who promulgated “open source” to abolish the colossal marketing blunders that were associated with the term “free software”, I think “free software” is <em>less bad</em> than “FLOSS”. Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery. </p>
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<p>Rick adds:</p>
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<blockquote><p>
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The problem with [FOSS and FLOSS] isn’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>
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<p>That isn’t merely gross marketing failure; it’s a semantic black hole that sucks marketing into it, never to be seen again. It’s a finely executed study in nomenclature incompetence – and I can’t help noticing it’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></blockquote>
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<p>Er. Yes. Quite…</p>
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