brian will . net

Tomorrow I’ll post an argument about whether or not the claims RMS (Richard “Not Milhous” Stallman) makes regarding freedom have justification, but today I want to talk about some things on which RMS is clearly wrong, and they all relate to terminology:

1. “open source” is a perfectly good term for ethical software: RMS has admitted that “free software” is not a terribly satisfactory designation for ethical software, and in fact, there doesn’t seem to exist a particularly apt term in the English language. (Perhaps “freedom software”?) It’s true that the phrase “open source” was explicitly coined to play down the ethical and anti-monetary connotations of “free software”, but what about the words “open” and “source” are contrary to free software? The phrase is not sufficient to convey the ethical ideals, but it’s very clear by now that “free” is neither adequate nor sufficient to the job either. If Stallman wants to debate the primacy of ethical concerns over practical/technical concerns, I see no reason that can’t be done within the spacious confines of the term “open source”.
2. castigating others for their use of terminology is rarely productive: First off, everyone in the FOSS community has heard Stallman’s claims already, and it’s not for lack of terminology discipline that many disagree with some of his positions. Meanwhile, those in the broader, non-technical audience have probably not heard these arguments; shaking this group’s confidence in its very vocabulary is not going to empower these people to enter a technical discussion. Second, terms like “intellectual property” and “digital rights management” may be somewhat biased, but they’re generally useful and established. If a term is really egregiously biased, fine, offer your alternative and support its use with argument, but by castigating your audience’s use of terms, you make it literally hard for them to agree with you.
3. the operating system should not be called “gnu/linux”: In general, Stallman seems not to know how language works: “Linux” is a proper name, and there’s no good reason why it can’t refer to whatever the hell convention says it does. If “Linux” did just refer to a kernel, then we wouldn’t have need for ever saying “the Linux kernel” to distinguish it from “Linux”, yet we do need to make this distinction. Sure this naming is arguably just an historical accident, and of course the GNU project deserves credit for its work, but names are not about conveying correct origins. Names used to be about origins rather than convenience, and it wasn’t fun, e.g. people had names such as “Roger, son of William, son of James, son of Charles”. What good is freedom if it demands we spend all our time and cognition learning, saying, reading, writing, and typing the “proper” name for things? The only possibly good reason to insist on using the term “gnu/linux” is as a matter of advocacy–RMS suggests it might encourage people to inquire about the peculiar name and thereby learn about software freedom–but this won’t work for reasons mentioned in point #2.

I say all this generally supporting RMS’s ethical position. That position is not going to be advanced by being a dick stickler about terminology.