{"id":882,"date":"2009-03-26T23:12:41","date_gmt":"2009-03-27T04:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=882"},"modified":"2012-08-11T18:25:36","modified_gmt":"2012-08-11T22:25:36","slug":"please-forget-to-floss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=882","title":{"rendered":"Please forget to FLOSS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In email to a third party, copied to me, Linux activist and long-time friend Rick Moen comments on the acronym FLOSS (usually explanded &#8220;Free, Libr&eacute;, and Open Source&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids.  We learned in the late 1990s a number of lessons about how <em>not<\/em> to market free \/ open source, and the idiots who keep coming up with bad ideas like &#8220;FLOSS&#8221; and &#8220;FOSS&#8221; are determined to rush, like urban-legend lemmings, off the very cliff of PR incompetence that we so painfully learned to <em>finally<\/em> avoid, a decade ago.  I&#8217;m sorry, but those people need to be cluebombed and routed around until they stop shooting at everyone&#8217;s feet.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t have put it better myself, so I&#8217;m not going to try.<\/p>\n<p>Near as I can figure, the only appeal this term has is a sort of lily-livered political correctness, as though people think they&#8217;d be making an ideological commitment that will cause petulant screaming from a million basements if they pick &#8220;open source&#8221; or &#8220;free software&#8221;.  <\/p>\n<p>Well, speaking as the guy who promulgated &#8220;open source&#8221; to abolish the colossal marketing blunders that were associated with the term &#8220;free software&#8221;, I think &#8220;free software&#8221; is <em>less bad<\/em> than &#8220;FLOSS&#8221;.  Somebody, please, shoot this pitiful acronym through the head and put it out of our misery. <\/p>\n<p>Rick adds:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThe problem with [FOSS and FLOSS] isn&#8217;t merely that that they sound like goofy nutjob organisation investigated by Emma Peel and John Steed. Worse, it is that neither term can be understood without first understanding <em>both<\/em> free software and open source, as prerequisite study.<\/p>\n<p>That isn&#8217;t merely gross marketing failure; it&#8217;s a semantic black hole that sucks marketing into it, never to be seen again. It&#8217;s a finely executed study in nomenclature incompetence &#8211; and I can&#8217;t help noticing it&#8217;s promoted by, among others, the same crowd who were doing such a masterful job of keeping free software an obscure ideology prior to 1998.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Er.  Yes.  Quite&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In email to a third party, copied to me, Linux activist and long-time friend Rick Moen comments on the acronym FLOSS (usually explanded &#8220;Free, Libr&eacute;, and Open Source&#8221;. I continue to find it difficult to take seriously anyone who adopts an excruciatingly bad, haplessly obscure acronym associated with dental hygiene aids. We learned in the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=882\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Please forget to FLOSS<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4491,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions\/4491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}