Subject: Re: OS/FS nitpickin'
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 14 2001 - 19:05:03 CST
At 11:14 PM 2/14/01 +0100, Mike Nordell wrote:
>Perhaps some think this is nitpicking, but looking at Abi the ants homepage
>at abisource, you can't help yourself notice that "our" and speaks about
>"Open Source" (capitalization quoted) wehen what *we* do is developing Free
>Software. Did this strike anyone but me as somewhat ... disrespectful...?
>
>I _love_ free software, and I respect the "open source" movement, but I
>rather develop free software than open source if I had the opportunity.
>
>AbiWord is GPL, so why is "our" ant speaking of "Open Source"???
Oh, please don't start that flamewar here.
My goal is to build cool GPL products that Just Work, so that millions of
people will love using them. I'm probably a lot more sympathetic to RMS's
agenda than, say, Eric, but I too prefer to label our stuff Open Source.
If you ask your average church secretary what they think of free software,
they're more likely to think of crappy shareware and freebie giveaways than
something ultra-high-quality. RMS may be a prophet, but his terminology is
by no means mainstream. (Witness the incessant clarifications in the
community between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.)
By contrast, a lot of the work to build positive brand awareness around the
term Open Source has already been done. 'Nuff said.
Paul
PS: Does this mean we won't get XP dialogs? ;-)
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