Re: Irony

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

> One very good thing about Open Source is that the etymology of it is 
> non-intuitive enough that one feels obligated to look a definition up,
> and not assign intuitive (or counter-intuitive) meaning to it.

Yes, but it has the wrong emphasis when you do look it up. It has to do
with the methodology of producing the software, with the supposed benefits
for quality. Our customers for example, don't really care about the
methodology ot production of software per se, though they are of course
interested in quality. They do worry that "open source" might be associated
with lack of control of development, which they associate with lack of
quality, and we do have to address this concern.

The issue of Free Software has a completely different emphasis. Namely on
what you can do with the software once you get it. Our customers definitely
find that it is advantageous to have a software license that gives them
as much freedom as possible, and the notion of a license that does this
is, far from being a concern, a major pragmatic and commercial advantage.

P.S. the Catholic Church also takes existing terms and assigns them some
specific meanings. The word catholic comes from the greek and latin words
catholicus meaning universal. Of course in the case of Free Software, the
dual unrelated meanings of the word Free do indeed cause confusion. That's
why at ACT we decided to put our Free Software site in France, where it
is called www.act-europe.fr/libre/ and if you go there you will see that
we use the term "Libre Software", with an explanation of why ... :-)