itch.io

I’m sure we could have a fun debate about license technicalities or rms’s and Kant’s disregard to consequences. Nothing wrong with a small talk. It’s just that I already don’t know what your point is.

My point is that “Open Source” has an agreed-upon definition and companies have a history of trying to language-lawyer and spin-doctor it in bad faith in the past (both directly and through terms like “Shared Source”, “Open Core”, etc.), so odds are that anyone who tries to argue the definition is just going to be assumed to be a bad-faith actor by the community at large.

Also: your anti-feminist non sequitur is not appreciated

I proudly call myself a feminist. My issue is with extremists (feminist or otherwise) ruining that and other terms for the rest of us in their attempts to “voodoo doll” people’s perceptions and affiliations by spin-doctoring the language.

In fact, if you look at it fully generally, it’s the same phenomenon which drives what Steven Pinker dubbed the euphemism treadmill. People keep trying to escape the bad associations of words but, because the “bad thoughts” and “bad intentions” (to borrow George Carlin’s phrasing) remain, the euphemism eventually takes on the same corrupted association as society acclimatizes to using it.

(In a sense, it’s yet another expression of humans looking for simple solutions to complex problems.)

I don’t believe it’s a non-sequitur because, from the beginning, I’ve been talking about terminology and how people see its use.

Likewise, I’ll readily admit that RMS is an extremist, and I think his argument that “Linux” should be called “GNU/Linux” is based on a deceptive and unhelpful definition of what is and isn’t part of an operating system and completely ignores the relationship between humans and syllable counts in English terms.

(Seriously. X11 contributes more to the platform than GNU, but he hand-waves that by declaring that you don’t need a GUI to self-host operating system development with console emacs and GCC (which is a not insignificant part of GNU’s size) counts as part of the OS despite not being installed on most systems unless you need it to compile the nVidia proprietary driver’s “GPL condom” because the definition of an OS is, according to him, everything you need to self-host its development and not one jot more. …and if you want to talk about it from a binary compatibility standpoint, then it should still be glibc/Linux or X11/Linux, not GNU/Linux.)