[TOS] General vision: Free Software welcome here?
Chris Tyler
chris at tylers.info
Mon Mar 23 15:55:45 UTC 2009
Welcome, MJ, and thanks for your note.
On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 13:12 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Hi, my company speaks about free software, or at least FOSS. I see
> various other threads also using "FOSS". Are we welcome here?
Everyone interested in teaching or supporting the teaching of
community-based open source is absolutely welcome here. See the
[[Taxonomy]] page on the wiki for clarification if desired.
> If so, can we include "foss" in the project and list names, please?
One person's OSS is another person's FOSS and someone else's FLOSS or
F/LOSS. We're all pretty clearly on the same page.
On a personal level, I support Free Software concepts and have
financially contributed to the FSF. However, I'm tired of explaining
"Free" in English, which doesn't have separate words for libre and
gratis -- for example, one person wishing to present at the Free
Software and Open Source symposium last year had a completely-closed
proprietary product that he was distributing free of cost to schools
around the world, and he could not understand why I didn't consider it
"free software" despite multiple conversations.
If you want to insert "FOSS" onto some of the wiki pages, feel free, but
I think that the majority opinion is that we all understand what we're
talking about regardless of the acronym used. Consequently, as the site
administrator for teachingopensource.org, I have no intention of
changing the wiki title, mailing list name, or domain name at this time.
-Chris
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