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« Reply #46 on: August 26, 2007, 06:37:47 pm »
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"Free software" or "free software", first letter capital depending on where in a sentence it is, means either software which is free according to the definition of Free Software Foundation, or it means free as in "no price". The latter however is better described as "freeware", if it does not give any additional freedoms, to avoid confusion (in the same way often the free as in freedom software is called "libre software").
"Free Software" (with both words starting capital), refers to the movement advocating free software with the definition of free as in "freedom" (not necessarily free of price unless it does under "free as in freedom" as well).
A compromise in naming the topic could be "Gratis software list" as this will avoid all ambiguity, because gratis always means "at no price"/"for nothing". Of course we could also just remove all the freeware, or make a new topic without it, and call it "Libre software list" which would avoid ambiguity in the other way, because libre always mean "free as in freedom".
Yes, but free software should only refer to free software.
well, there's an ambiguity in the word so it refers to both libre and gratis software. However, gratis software is more often known as freeware while libre software is more often known as "free software". Free software is the term used by the Free Software movement. But you can't avoid the fact that a lot of people use the term to describe gratis software.  The best thing to do in that situation is to avoid the ambiguity by using more specific words, such as "libre" and "gratis".
That's true, but most people will probably think you're "Mexican" if you use libre and gratis.
In fact, my aunt doesn't like Ubuntu because it was made in South Africa.
Well, libre and gratis comes from Latin. And Spanish comes from Latin. And AFAIK Mexican comes from Spanish. In Swedish we don't have the ambiguity either because we say "fri" and "gratis" (we CAN use "fri" for gratis as well, but we would need to say "'fri' of price", but "fri" alone doesn't mean gratis... does that makes sense?). A lot of other germanic languages is like that as well.
And your aunt has some weird logic there... o_O; WTH?
She's a little racist.
... and paranoid. >_>
Kinda ironic, because I wouldn't be surprised if Ubuntu was mostly put together by the "white" population of South Africa. Not that it matters. Racists are mostly kinda ignorant anyway >.>
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