Bonum Certa Men Certa

Boycotting the Term Open Source and Speaking About Software Freedom Instead (If and Where Applicable)

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Summary: It seems apparent that more and more developers now realise that "Open Source" is a sham (and was likely a sham all along), so they reject the term and start speaking about Free software again, stressing freedom to confront corporate takeovers and manipulation

We recently mentioned (many times in fact) that various Free software developers no longer use the term "Open Source", perhaps seeing the mess that OSI has become and the sheer prevalence of corporate openwashing.



"...I've persuaded several writers to write "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux"..."RMS was right.

Moreover, over the years I've persuaded several writers to write "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux", especially where that's applicable (not purely kernel stuff).

IBM et al tried to cancel RMS in 2019 (same year the Red Hat takeover was finalised and one year before effectively canning CentOS). They don't want people to talk about stuff like software freedom (as opposed to some "open source" systemd on Microsoft servers in proprietary GitHub) and to cancel ideas, often personified albeit unwittingly*, they can work hard to cancel a person. The events of 2019 were preceded by over a decade of similar attempts to cancel RMS, usually by people who according to him "treated [him] like shit." _____ * RMS did not call GNU after himself, unlike Linus Torvalds.

"When I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix"!"

--Richard Stallman

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