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Comment by baud147258 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding this part:

"they had to pay soon for Free Software. None of them ever mentions ‘Software Libre’, but they all know about ‘Software Gratuit’. "

In French, we have two word for Free: Libre is for free as in free speech and gratuit is for free as in free beer.

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Same in German. It's a quirk of English that free as in freedom and free as in no cost are the same word.

But then you get the great quip that 'freedom isn't free'...

"Freiheit ist nicht umsonst" just doesn't have the same ring :-)

In English we do have the word "liberty" for freedom.

Well, we do have the word "liberty" in English, too. Maybe it's more that one meaning for a word and one word for a meaning just aren't enough for us.

> Well, we do have the word "liberty" in English, too

But no commonly-used adjective form of that noun.

True, "liberated software" doesn't have quite the right tone these days.

I've seen the acronym FLOSS used: Free, Libre and Open Source Software

Which we had to borrow to distinguish the two, thus LibreOffice (which is also conveniently GratuitOffice).

In Polish there are different words for free as in free speech and for free as in free beer. But, interestingly, the words for "free" as in free speech and for "slow" are the same, so "wolne oprogramowanie" can mean both "free software" and "slow software" :-) If I remember correctly, the etymology for both words is "wola" which means "will" - if you were free, you could act on your own will, but you also could do things on your own pace. Slowly, that is. But I'm not completely certain if I remember the etymology right, so take it with a grain of salt:-)

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