summary of Re: Beyond 'open standard'

[Giacomo Poderi]

Georg C. F. Greve ha scritto:
>  || On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:22:01 +0200
>  || Stefano Maffulli <stef at zoomata.com> wrote: 
> 
>  sm> I like this: fair is a good term. Like in "fair trade" or "fair
>  sm> play" it carries a positive meaning, non discrimination is
>  sm> included.  IMHO we have a clear winner here.  What do you think?
> 
> I see more problems with fair than with free, to be honest.
> 
> While with free we always have to explain the difference between
> freedom and price, freedom is comparatively well-defined when looking
> at other terms, in particular open.
> 
> On the other hand: ask someone what is fair and the answers you will
> get will deviate much, much more. Microsoft certainly considers it
> fair to pay patent royalties -- so will some other companies. This is
> a term that can backfire badly on us.

I'm sorry to point out that probably for this there is no real solution:
for example Microsoft certainly consider free the software they offer
for downloading within their website [0]
In the discussion we have been mixed two different aspects
1) What is the definition of a term (therefore what it means)
2) How people use that term in the daily life

We can determine 1), but we cannot determine 2).
We can only observe at 2)
And this is true for *any* term in any language

Greetings,
Giacomo

[0]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx?pocId=&freetext=Free%20software&DisplayLang=en
-- 
   []   Giacomo Poderi <poderi at fsfeurope.org>
 [][][]
   ||   Fellow n.593, http://www.fsfe.org

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