The period in Free Software history beginning sometime around Free Software 9/11. [1] Begins with the Fourth Age of Free Software [2] and is characterised by corporate-instigated Salem-Witch-Trial-like hunting of Free Software luminaries and contributors, often carried out by traitors within organisations.
Also known as "FLOSS" for "Free/Libre, Open Source Software". FLOSS wrongly implies that Free/Libre and Open Source are similar, but if Nineteen-Eighty-Source has anything to do with freedom, why does everyone pushing it want to rewrite the dictionary and add telemetry to our software? The answer? It's not OSS, it's 198S. If that's too cumbersome, you can call it FL/BS for short.
A theoretical but hoped-for time which ends the Free Software Dark Ages, [7] where users and developers are no longer essentially cheap labour for monopolistic corporations who malign, decapitate and exploit our communities. Dark ages practically imply a following renaissance, but one can't come too soon.
A joint effort between Richard Stallman, the FSF, IBM and Microsoft to toy with users for nearly 40 years before turning them into unpaid labour for IBM/Microsoft. Untying Stallman might help, the FSF will sell T-shirts instead.
An artificial community substitute, similar to vanillin. Created by deprotonating community guidelines, a process where valued leaders are converted to "free radicals" and catalysts for real progress become neutral.
Microsoft's effort to port the UNIX kernel to Finnish. Sometimes people pretend it's an operating system-- it doesn't even have a bootloader (except LILO).
An event where the For-profit sponsor(s) of a Not-for-profit organisation or project takes control of the latter. See "Antitrust law"[9], "Open Source"[10]
An acquisition technique that is a favourite among Microsoft execs and writers of Scooby-Doo episodes, where someone hoping to take over a property first makes it look undesirable (by dressing up as a ghost and scaring people away) so that others don't bid higher, show interest or have competition for the property at all.
Also used in haggling: "Oh, this doesn't look like very good quality, I could get it for a tenth this price somewhere else" except it's directed towards other potential buyers and the public, rather than the owner.
FUD -> sabotage -> cheaper acquisition (could also be called the Nokia Handset maneuver).
A ruse for taking someone's money involving three moving cups and an object, where a scammer uses slight-of-hand to prevent the player from guessing which cup has the object underneath. Based on an elaborate scheme where Richard Stallman is symbolically replaced with Linus Torvalds, before Torvalds is literally replaced with Microsoft. See "Open Source"[11]
An extremely disingenuous argument from Open Source, which feigns an apolitical stance then (in a thoroughly narcissistic ploy) demands the same in kind. Code can have a political outcome, but Open Source creates a fallacy around this which dances around the idea that all political problems have technical solutions. It takes the fallacy further by implying or stating that technical solutions are invariably more efficient, and that politics are simply a waste of time.
A lot of the time it's a false dichotomy and straw man, going so far as to imply (or flat out lie, as with Debian's GR in 2020) that the party they're addressing hasn't spent plenty of time and effort creating and offering technical solutions already-- only to have terribly bad politics stand in their way.
Despite this front, Open Source lobbies, works with lobbyists and P.R. firms, and "talks when it could be coding" with the full weight of the corporate tech press behind it. So when they tell you to shut up and code, not only are they at that very moment doing exactly what they're telling you not to-- they're basically implying "Let us handle the politics. You just lay down and stop representing yourself." And they've played this bit for two entire decades.
A fuel-guzzling SUV that is not only too large for your garage, but larger than your house; which is more or less required to go next door. On the plus side, now everything on Earth is next-door-- but on the minus side, at least doing some things actually used to be practical.
A similar dictionary to this one, except that instead of encouraging people to make their conscious replacements and critique of propaganda, it becomes a requirement in some communities (e.g. Trisquel's) to adopt someone else's "GNUspeak" dictionary. ⬆
