Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They Are Loaded or Confusing
gnu.org
gnu.org
So let me try to find something similar from a different perspective:
Copyleft Free Software: You may not be able to use copyleft licensed code together with code licensed under a different license. Better words are CDDL-proprietary or GPL-proprietary. An example in a sentence: ZFS can't be integrated into Linux because Linux is GPL-proprietary.
A little bit of wordplay is charming, but RMS just takes it so far.
Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting.
Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux".
Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided only because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet.
The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago.
"Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're ensuring that the computer works in your interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC.
Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly-unnecesary noise to get it across.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google.
... But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”/“cracker” thing, that effort is a lost cause that he just won’t let go, but it’s useful to preserve as a time capsule of the cultural events that led to our current state. There have been multiple complaints that computing is a pop culture, with no sense of the past or the future. RMS is connected to both past and future.
Hmm. I'm not really sure, as I'm certainly not a rhetorical pro. But I feel like defining new negative terms and discussing them, rather than re-casting other terms, would be a good start.
The "Trusted Computing" example mentioned in the article and in a child comment is a good one to look at, I think. "Trusted Computing" sounds Orwellian to start with; as the rule of thumb goes, if you need to put an adjective in the name, it's probably not true [0]. So eschewing "Trusted Computing" makes good sense, but re-casting it as "Treacherous Computing" is goofy, and just sounds like a snide and kinda pathetic attack. Maybe it'd be better to create a new positive name ("Verifiable Computing", say) and discuss how it's better than "Trusted Computing"?
[0] cf. "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, German "Democratic" Republic, "United" States of America, Computer "Science"
.. A much more evocative and accurate title. You don't put DRM on something to make it more open, you put DRM on something to restrict it. The name itself is inherently weaseley, this inversion actually calls it what it accomplishes. Besides, nothing is lost, since the initialism is more common in everyday usage.
But a great deal of it is just tiresome pedantry.
Not really, considering that the "meanings" of words in everyday usage have already been deliberately reconstructed and promulgated by the billion-dollar PR engines of the tech industry. For example, how does the word "theft" possibly apply to a person sitting minding his own business on his own computer? It doesn't, so don't use it that way.
Which concepts you lump together under a single word, and which you split between different words, is important and also highly subjective - or transjective if you will (shared reality) - but it's a fallacy to think the delineation of concepts is an "objective" distinction.
For certain entrenched powers, it's useful to lump together carjackers with music downloaders into a single category ("thieves"). Others find it useful to distinguish, and avoid using the same word. Similarly, some find it useful to distinguish between licenses which are promote freedom, vs those which encumber freedom - rather than using a blanket term "BSD-like" that includes both.
- As mentioned, verbing "GIMP" can give it at least two loaded meanings which have _nothing_ to do with the image editor.
- "Cracker" also has a very, very different and loaded meaning outside of software.
And holy heck, the whole GNU slash Linux debate has gotten to the point of mass parody with the "I'd like to interject for a moment" meme. The worst part of it is that it's easy to argue against this point because there are Linux systems out there which don't necessarily use the GNU toolchain. The statement tries extremely hard to generalize the idea that Linux is irreparably crippled without the good graces of the GNU toolchain.
Ugh.
I want to push for the adoption of free and open source software and hardware, and I really do care about the ability to see the internals of, and tinker with, and break, and then fix the stuff I run in my day-to-day, but this kind of article makes the FOSS community (the free community especially; but the OSS community by extension) look bad by imposing this image of snobbishness and obsession over honestly minute details.
The movement to popularize free software and hardware won't be won by making people stop calling digital audio players "MP3 players," when it's an accurate term for an overwhelmingly large part of the digital audio player market.
There are very few (just android?) distributions that don't use the GNU userland[0].
> The operating system in which Linux is used is basically GNU with Linux added.
I'm not sure how you lump all distros into a single "operating system".
And anyway, I'm not sure what the point of this argument is anyway. Why stop at the GNU userland? An OS with only GNU userland and the kernel would be nearly useless, so there's a lot more to it than that.
"Please stop saying GNU/Linux. It's really KDE[1] with some GNU programs and Linux kernel tacked on".
"Please stop saying KDE/GNU/Linux; your OS is really just Firefox[1] with some other apps, utilities and a kernel somewhere underneath."
[1] Insert your favorite desktop/shell/browser if appropriate.
-- Sent from my <textarea>/HTML/Hacker News/Gecko/Firefox/GNOME/GNU/Linux
I think a lot of people agree there and don't do that. My machine is running Debian, not "linux", and the fact is that the kernel is just one of many packages which can be replaced. It holds no more special places on my machine than Emacs, GNU or Firefox.
The problem comes when people want to lump together several operative systems under the same umbrella. We could call them Unix systems, Linux distributions, GNU/Linux, and even systemd-based distributions, and it is a solution to a problem that I find unnecessary inflammatory and over debated.
For example, my graphical environment comes from X.org and KDE. And I spend a lot of time in my web browser, which doesn't come from GNU, either: that's either Chromium (code by Google) or Pale Moon (fork of code by Mozilla). Keep in mind that modern web browsers are full-fledged virtual machines that run applications developed by thousands of organizations all across the globe.
On the command line, my shell is zsh. The servers I run come from organizations like the Apache Software Foundation (httpd) and OpenBSD (openssh). Most of the hobbyist dev work I do is in Python, which certainly isn't GNU. While many of the command-line utilities I use do come from GNU, you could probably swap most of them out for BusyBox and it'd take a while for me to notice. That leaves, what, gcc? Well, even that isn't safe what with clang gaining traction and all...
At a high level, GNU is irrelevant.
And thanks to systemd, the init system is now closely coupled to so many functions of the system that systemd-based distributions and non-systemd distributions are wildly different. A kFreeBSD distribution using GNU "userland" and a traditional init system feels wildly different from a Linux distribution using GNU "userland" and systemd. Really, systemd vs. sysvinit makes far more difference than glibc vs. some other libc. We're reaching a point where the init system is what makes different OSes feel different at a low level, not the CLI utilities and the libc.
So if GNU is irrelevant from both a user-interactive level and a core system level, then how is it relevant?
If you don't like the word, just do a word-replace for "freedom" with "liberty". Liberty has a extremely long history of people trying to define it, and John Locke (1632–1704) once wrote on that subject: freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it: 'A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.' ".
And if we talk about liberty, we must acknowledge the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion. FSF focus heavily on the absence of coercion part, like not having patents, proprietary licenses and DRM coercing user and developers of software.
The other major difference is that they're not marketing a product or a service, but rather an _idea_, which makes them come off a lot more pretentious than I think they actually are. Okay, scratch that- a _little_ more pretentious than they actually are. ;)
But I mean, let's also consider that in the market of ideas, the idea of free software IS, and always has been, under siege by companies who _really don't_ want it to be a Thing. Or at least, companies who have ideas which are only profitable if free software isn't a thing. If you're going to establish an organization whose entire purpose is to keep an idea relevant and un-subverted for a long period of time, it's crucial to come up with practices for "memetic sanitation".
I mean, look at U.S. political discourse over the last, say, 30 years. Politicians are experts at this sort of subtle semantic manipulation- repackaging old ideas under new names, giving disparaging/complimentary nicknames to existing ideas they want to reject/promote, or recombining names so that one idea gets mushed up with another in the minds of the public. It's memetic warfare.
And so, for the most part, I sympathize with the FSF for doing a hard job. They're playing the game with their cards face-up, and trying to keep their side of the Overton window from getting dragged to a place which they, and I myself, believe will cause the world to become a worse place.
tl;dr- if you're not worried about the Green Party's political ideology, you probably don't need to worry about the FSF's political ideology.
What's my comparison? Yeah, that's been GIMPed. Gimp has meanings other than "Gnu image manipulation program", like talking about handicapped peoples. In the wrong places, saying it's GIMPed can get you in real trouble.
Those sorts of language changes happen, and it's just never worth fighting for. Especially hacker vs cracker, that one was lost a long, long time ago.
Several of these fit into the same mental territory as genericized trademarks, i.e. digital audio player instead of mp3 player, or Kleenex-brand facial issues instead of Kleenex, again, not worth fighting for.
And several of these carry political loading of their own (e.g. don't say "theft"), as well as that perpetual lost cause, GLAMP.
Oh well. Happily the FSF does a lot of other good work.
One of the biggest issues in my mind is that the GNU camp likes to expropriate words with established meanings, then attempt to categorize everyone else's use of the words as inappropriate. However, that is only a part of the in-fighting which tends to occur between the "free" and "open source" software movements and helps to marginalize them in the eyes of the layman.
Entities invested in intellectual property have tried, and largely succeeded, to influence what terms people use to describe intellectual property. They do this because it's an effective way of affecting public opinion, by anchoring certain concepts against other concepts (it's more effective on people who don't have a strong opinion, which for copyright law is the majority of people). It's a common and useful marketing tactic.
RMS is observant enough to see this happening, and recognize that it is one of the battlefields of public opinion. He is trying to counter it. And he is doing it in an open and transparent fashion, unlike his opposition, which unfairly opens him up to criticism.
The main problem I have is that terminology seems to be the main front where RMS focuses most of his efforts. He spends more time on pedantry and very fine, subtle arguments about distinctions between different types of abstract freedoms. So much that actual messaging becomes a secondary priority, to his detriment.
RMS of course cares much more about truthiness than he does what others think of him(and he was right before, remember it?). If one puts 'self-awareness' above 'truthiness' in their mind, it's no wonder they'll think this is weird, eccentric, etc. The cool thing about Truth, though, is that it's way above vanity and opinion. The former scratches the later two, the opposite, not so much or not for very long.
I... don't... know... where... to... start....
You could start with a capital "c" ("the Creator").
No, no, no. "crackers" has its own sordid baggage.
Hacker: One who breaks into computer systems or networks one does not control or have access to.
Cracker: One who breaks into software and firmware on their devices as to gain control of root over their machines. This may be in contention with the arbitrary licenses they may have agreed to prior to installation or purchase.
Try and understand the different culture before condemning it all!
It's definitely the worth the time to actually read it.
Sadly the title of the page predicts what most people commenting seem to have done -
Skimmed, got triggered by a word or a turn of phrase and came to type their first objection really quick.
Someone might randomly stumble on this page and see "oh, supporting the free-software movement means using newspeak" and decide it's a crackpot movement on the same level as Alex Jones.
When I saw the topic and the URL I was taken back to the coreboot fiasco, and I was sure this was related.. but no, it's just a load of recommendations on changing language that nobody will follow. And mostly there is strong justification for not following, even if GNU/FSF had a huge following.
Who on earth wants to replace "Photoshopped" with "GIMPed" or "digitally manipulated", it's not going to win friends with suggestions like this.. even if I see their point.
https://opensource.com/business/16/11/open-source-not-free-s...
Obsessing about it at this level, and trying to cram so much meaning into them, is confusing surface with substance.
In the end, a word is just a few syllables some people use as shorthand for deeper concepts. It can never be the concept.
If you ran a LAMP shop, and you told the developers that the company is switching to BAMP (BSD) or IAMP (Illumos), it wouldn't change the code the developers write one iota. Honestly, the important parts are "free as in beer" and "Unix-like" (and you could probably replace "Unix-like" with "command-line driven" and it'd work just as well).