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Comment by chroem | Hacker News Reader

Free software; the term is free software. In other words, software that respects your freedom.

Refer to this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...

This is a language battle which will never, ever be won, not even with geeks, let own real people. Invent a new term ("liberated software"), or let it go. It is this sort of ideological pedantry that holds back FOSS adoption.

Provide better justification rather than "its my opinion".

It's a mental "snap-to-grid" problem. The average American hears the word "free", and they immediately think of $0, absent a specific pre-existing linguistic context (free country, free speech, free range). Because software is something that is frequently paid for as a product on a shelf, a non-enthusiast is always going to hear the $0 meaning in their head, even if they've been educated as to its other meaning.

At a high layer of abstraction, neural connections work probabilistically, firing in the path most likely to be a useful pattern; hence, most people will tend to assume "free" means "as in beer". However, a new term like "liberated software" will not trip this pre-existing wiring, forcing a new pathway that doesn't have to compete with the conditioning created by a lifetime of marketing messages ("Free Checking! Free Estimate! Free For The First Year!"... etc)

And it's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux!

Ordinarily I think Stallman takes that way too far, but in this case the exact motivation behind free software was being described, yet it was still placed under the banner of open source. I think there's a time and a place for both terms, but when you're talking about resisting the NSA, you are (or should be) referring to free software.

That statement would make sense if the distros we are using were mainly just Linux kernel + GNU tools. If we are going to give everyone their deserved credit, we should call it GNU/Linux/KDE/Apache/LibreOffice/...

Good thing 4-clause BSD never caught on in the Linux world.

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