"Why we speak about Free Software" campaign

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

Such a campaign is always good news, specially if directed towards 
the users (corporate or private) instead of only to the developers,
to try to get them to reclaim their rights and blur the artificial 
divide between user and developer. 


El Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 11:53:57AM -0500, Georg C. F. Greve deia:
> Having followed the development of the Open Source Initative for three
> years, the reasons to prefer the term Free Software have become even
> more true. For various reasons, Free Software or the equivalent term
> in the local language is offering many advantages.
> 
> 
Just a suggestion. Why use the term "local language"?. It may look 
as if you meant English was a global language and the rest are 
"only" local languages. I know that wasn't what was meant, just 
trying to avoid any sensibility hurt or misunderstanding, however 
unlikely. I'd simply say "any language". Paranoid people may feel 
you don't regard all languages as of equal value. But frankly, I don't 
know why the whole sentence is necessary. You shouldn't need to 
give permission to people to translate a phrase, specially something 
as straight and plain as "free software".

Since the document is going to be translated to many languages, 
the term Free Software (in English) won't appear in the translations
(or maybe in parenthesis or something, but I don't know whether it is even 
needed, it is pretty obvious). Well, in any case it won't appear 
alone in English, so the fact that "the equivalent term in the local 
language" is valuable, will be obvious from the use in the document 
itself. I don't know, but it sounds to me like if you said, 
"the term Free Software, either spoken aloud or written, in any 
typeface...". It's superfluous. 

Well, I don't know, maybe I'm just being paranoid about "political correctness". By the way "local language" appears somewhere else, too. 

I'd also put the "Free software offers freedom" part at the top, 
so that:

- You avoid a forward refrence in 
>Although access to the source code is a precondition for two of the
>freedoms, access to the source code alone is not enough. 

- If someone does not read it all at least they will read the four freedoms. 

 


-- 
Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis at tinet.org