Why terminology matters

[strypey]

Continuing the discussion from Free Code tools for music-making:

@prinlu

why not use established terms? most people call it floss or free/libre open source software or at least open source

Because the established terms are flawed. Aside from being an acronym, FOSS/FLOSS is meaningless in the context, making it kind of NewSpeak, which I try to avoid using. Open Source still misses the point and has been used by analogy almost to the point of meaninglessness. Free Code is a way of saying the same thing as Free Software (the original term), but is less likely to create the libre/gratis confusion that led to the use of Open Source as a way of describing the same software.

I’ve been saying Free Code for years and nobody else has picked it up, which is a shame. Now it’s a habit and I still think it mostly gets the point across. Even when it results in some confusion, it gets people thinking about the underlying issues, rather than glossing over them. Which seems like a net good to me.

[prinlu]

I wonder about the title you have put here (Why terminology matters). I mean I understand the title, but you didn’t really go into it. Did you want to say that using an acronim is meaningless? Why is FLOSS meaningless in your view?

Just to be clear from my side - litres of ink have been spilled on the topic the difference between Open Source (OSI) and F/LOSS (gnu.org) and I don’t actually feel confident to argue the details. My personal (and subjective, activist) position is though this: I prefer socialism over anarcho-capitalist directions. As an artist I think ownership is a disease, it’s a theft indeed. Art belongs to everyone. Or any creative endeavor. I’ll be eterenaly grateful to Linus Torvalds to choose GNU GPL instead of some MIT licence. I think Stallman is a prick, but his insistence on ‘libre’ in FLOSS is, in my view, one of greatest contribution to possibility that I can now type this on a libre computer software.

So… the copyleft part. The copyfarleft part. “Open source software MUST stay open source even in derivative forms. The licence must ensure virality of this concept.” What terminology should be used here, which would carry over the complexity of software industry (proprietary and open source). How can we designate the “open source” as locked-in by e.g. Apple on one side, and the provisions by General Public Licence and its copyleft idea on the other? With artistic and cultural artefacts in context of Creative Commons this was tackled by “Free Culture” stamp. And to a large degree this, in my view again, worked (see Definition of Free Cultural Works).

I agree that terminology matters, but so does (or precisely because of) the context. I just felt “Free Code” does not really do justice to all different forms of how source code can be shared (from very restrictive, to extremely loose, and in what directions…). FLOSS is not a good solution, but it’s the best we have at the moment. I also like Libre Software.

To explain my own subjective position, I currently licence my works using peer production licence which is like Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike but with Non-Capitalist clause/modification which gives permission to for-profit exploitation of works only to worker-owned endeavours.

I think this discussion is interesting precisely because the use of language is indeed important. But, also, it can dvelve into nitpicking into eternity.

EDIT: I’m just realizing I might be saying things you already know quite well and that my tone might be interpreted as smartassholery. I apologize if that is the appearance, as it’s far from my intention.

[strypey]

@prinlu

Why is FLOSS meaningless in your view?

This seems self-evident to me. Imagine you had no background in this space and you saw it written as ‘Floss software’/ ‘Foss software’ (as some people do). ‘Open Source’ does at least provide a combo of words from which newbies can try to extract meaning, although it’s unlike to mean much to them if they don’t know the programming jargon term ‘source code’. ‘Libre software’ communicates very little to those outside the choir (or speakers of Spanish, etc), who know what ‘libre’ and ‘gratis’ mean.

Free Code, in contrast, consists of 2 familiar words. One that implies either freedom or free-of-charge (both of which are correct when it comes to the code itself), and one that more people will recognise as software-related than ‘source’. When combined with the word ‘software’, as in ‘Free Code software’, I think this communicates more to newbies than any other phrase commonly used to express the idea of software that respects people’s democratic freedoms (“civil liberties”). But I guess I’m wrong, because despite using this phrase all around the net for years, I’ve yet to convince anyone else to adopt it.

@prinlu

With artistic and cultural artefacts in context of Creative Commons this was tackled by “Free Culture” stamp.

Agreed, and this was probably one of the main inspirations for coining ‘Free Code’. I was very involved in CC from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, and already passionate about software freedom at that point, so I was very sympathetic to Students for Free Culture. I even tried to start a local chapter at a nearby university in the couple of years after Occupy. But by that stage most of the original SFC activists had aged out without recruiting from the next wave of students to keep the campus groups going, and that network too was retrenching into a more centralised NGO form.

@prinlu

I currently licence my works using peer production licence which is like Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike but with Non-Capitalist clause/modification which gives permission to for-profit exploitation of works only to worker-owned endeavours.

Which effectively makes it equivalent to a CC BY-NC-SA license, so neither a Free Culture license nor a Free Code license (not Free Software, not Open Source, not libre). No judgement, you have the legal right to license your code however you like. But it’s just a fact that software under Source Available licenses like this is proprietary when evaluated against the Free Software Definition, as is any downstream modification.

@prinlu

I’m just realizing I might be saying things you already know quite well and that my tone might be interpreted as smartassholery. I apologize if that is the appearance, as it’s far from my intention.

OMG Same! Thank you for making yourself vulnerable by sharing this, and please know I also feel this kind of anxiety about how my posts are received. One of the most difficult things in online discussions with new friends (I hope?), is that it’s hard to know how much background info to supply for context without teaching grandma to suck eggs

[strypey]

Speaking of context, it just occurred to me that I really ought to clarify one more thing;

@prinlu

I prefer socialism over anarcho-capitalist directions.

Same. Ever since I started learning about political philosophy I’ve considered myself to be some combo of libertarian socialist, anarcho-mutualist, and left-libertarian. Anarcho-capitalism always seem like self-contradictory nonsense, and as Graeber once pointed out, seems to be mainly an online phenomena (teenage conservatives LARPing as radicals).

I tend to think mixing political partisanship in with discussions of software freedom adds a lot of complexity without really adding much in the way of insight. But FWIW Stallman and the other FSF/GNU stalwarts don’t come across as anarchists of any kind to me, more like a combo of liberals and social democrats (or in US political jargon ‘democratic socialists’). Some of the folks who forked away to form OSI were more an-cap orientated (particularly Eric Raymond and Tim O’Reilly), but AFAICT they were a minority even in the early OSI.