[Freegis-list] GIS conference

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Mon, Jun 23, 2003 at 11:19:01AM +0200, Henrion Benjamin wrote:
> Just to inform you that there will be a track of conferences related to
> GIS and Open Source Free Software 

It is strange that the confusion of terminology
surrounding Free Software seem to be inflating.

Some people started calling Free Software "Open Source" around 1998.
Their aim was to create a marketing program for Free Software
with two steps: First make the practical pitch and then explain
about the values of freedom in a second step.
Unfortunately the second step did not happen as the term went popular, 
which make many people (including promined founding members of the OSI)
believe that the goal of the campain was not reached 
and the effort backfired and brought more confusion in the end.

Saying something like "Open Source Free Software" 
makes the confusion even deeper, because the set of licenses
which are Free Software and what some people suboptimally call "Open Source"
is (except border cases) the same set.
In contrast to this the political movements can be clearly distinquished.

Thus if you refer to software alone, the terms are already equal.
When a reference is made the choice of one of the two terms 
is also a poltical sign.  Using both is an attempt to stay neutral.
In my eyes the attempt is flawed. 
Especially in the case at hand Free Software 
might wrongly translate to "gratis" for many readers
if people know the meaining of "Open Source" to software,
because they'll never expect that a second term will mean the same,
otherwise it would have been superflous and would not have been mentioned.

	Bernhard

-- 
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