For Everything A Name Posted Tue, 24 Jan 2006

I've recently been speaking quite a bit about people who are principled, and sometimes not so principled, about free software.

Now, I'm not convinced that name calling has ever done any movement much good but I won't let that stop me when I want a few concise way to describe different groups of unprincipled, hypocritical, struggling, or just plain confused free software users -- at least not when it's all in good fun. I do not, as I've mentioned before, consider myself immune from either my criticism or my epithets. To appreciate either term, you merely must recognize that the term FLOSS is often used to mean Free, Libre and Open Source Software.

The first great term is the brilliant neologism flip-flosser, a creation of Dafydd Harries. It is perfect for describing the on-again off-again free software user.

My own addition is the more edgy flosstitute: an solid poke at anyone willing to sell out their principles and their movement for a little political good will or a slicker desktop.

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Lost my phantasie listening to entertaining podcasts (recorded speech): Who is anyone?
Posted by reuben at Wed Jan 25 03:27:58 2006
How about those who keep on praising FLOSS but not using it as using only mental FLOSS?

And those who only talk about it really are using dental FLOSS...
Posted by Yozz at Thu Jan 26 04:01:29 2006
What you said was correct of course. For me, it was a wake up call.. the last few years I've been using a mixture of Free Software and non-free software on my Mac - your post, plus some conclusions I arrived at late last year have convinced me that if I believe in this, I need to abandon all my non-free software.
Posted by Matt Lee at Thu Jan 26 07:55:51 2006

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