Bumping into Stallman, again by Frederick Jacobs.
From the post:
This is the second time I’m talking at the same conference as Richard Stallman, after the Ind.ie Tech Summit in Brighton, this time was at the Fri Software Days in Fribourg, Switzerland.
One day before my presentation, I got an email from the organizers, letting me know that Stallman would like me to rename the title of my talk to remove any mentions of “Open Source Software” and replace them with “Free Software”.
The email read like this:
Is it feasible to remove the terms “Open-Source” from the title of your presentation and replace them by “Free-libre software”? It’s the wish of M. Stallman, that will probably attend your talk.
Frederick didn’t change his title or presentation, while at the same time handling the issue much better than I would have.
Well, after I got through laughing my ass off that Stallman would presume to dictate word usage to anyone.
Word usage, for any stallmanists in the crowd, is an empirical question of how many people use a word with a common meaning.
At least if you want to be understood by others.