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Re: [school-discuss] Libre software! :)



Richard Andrews wrote:
> I personally prefer libre as it is free of
> misinterpretations; but the term is
> less well known and doesn't "click".

I just did a google search on "libre software"
and I got 73,000 hits in English, which is
pretty small by web standards.

> LOSS isn't such a good acronym (tied for
> last place with FLOSS).

The Wikipedia entry on "alternative terms for
free software" contains this:

>>>
Unlike "libre software", which aimed to solve the ambiguity problem, "FLOSS" aimed to avoid taking sides in the debate over whether it was better to say "free software" or to say "open-source software".

Proponents of the term point out that parts of the FLOSS acronym can be translated into other European languages, with for example the "F" representing free (English) or frei (German), and the "L" representing libre (Spanish or French), livre (Portuguese), or libero (Italian). However, this term is not often used in official, non-English, documents, since the words in these languages for "free as in freedom" do not have the ambiguity problem of English's "free".
>>>

I suppose we will never get this mess of
language and perception straightened out....

Joel



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