Talk About Software Freedom
"Linux" and "BSD" may mean a lot to more and more people, but they're still just brands or acronyms (GNU is recursive and it encapsulates the brand "UNIX")
TWENTY years ago I was still a student and almost everyone around me (postgraduate students) was a Windows user. All the "profs" used Windows (not even a Mac) and only one colleague used GNU/Linux. He liked Debian and later he introduced me to this new distro called Ubuntu, which he said some guy who had gone to space made a few weeks ago. I myself was a SuSE user at the time, whereas the labs ran Fedora Core.
20 years later we can see the collapse of Windows and the next batch of Daily Links will show the "founder" of XBox speaking of it like a religion, falling back on "hope" and "belief" because here in the UK console sales fell 39% in the past year.
XBox is, bluntly speaking, dying. Bing is... 'rebranding' again. Remember all the past names? I remember at least 5.
Windows is still used by a lot of people, but its latest version is so unloved that its market share is actually falling this year (despite being the latest version).
The world in which I lived 20 years ago is no more. Many use "Macs" and dual-booting GNU/Linux has become more common. Mobile devices are mostly "Linux", but paradoxically those devices spy more than ever before (even more than Windows XP).
Society in the digital realm needs the concept of "Software Freedom", not just "Linux" and "Android". So the vocabulary of advocates needs to adapt to concepts, not brands. It needs to adopt a message that is consistently true, no mater what a company like Novell or Red Hat (IBM) does, or what the Linux Foundation turns the Linux brand into. █