Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 19, 2003 01:24 AM
I'm the original poster (still AC, maybe I should create an account<nobr> <wbr></nobr>;-)
Capitalizing the phrase only works when in written discussion, such what we're doing. Unfortunately, most of the world communicates (especially business folk) in spoken word (face to face and/or over the phone), where the capitilization of a word/phrase is not obvious. It is those situations where, i feel, Freedom Software works much better.
Additionally, someone reading (or writing!) a proposal or newsletter who is unfamiliar with Free Software may not catch on, and I myself am guilty of it: back in my college days, and before I knew about F/OSS software, I did a report for a COM class (business communications) about a selecting a product for a software development project's usage (the report was the proposal of what to use, how much it would cost, resources required to operate, etc). In the report, I analyzed several different products, both F/OSS (again, not familiar with the idea and philosophy) and proprietary, and chose to recommend a commercial product. CVS was one of the FSS products, but because it was 'free,' I interpreted that to mean cheap, and thus a risk not worth taking.
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Re:problem with the words 'Free Software'
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 19, 2003 01:24 AMCapitalizing the phrase only works when in written discussion, such what we're doing. Unfortunately, most of the world communicates (especially business folk) in spoken word (face to face and/or over the phone), where the capitilization of a word/phrase is not obvious. It is those situations where, i feel, Freedom Software works much better.
Additionally, someone reading (or writing!) a proposal or newsletter who is unfamiliar with Free Software may not catch on, and I myself am guilty of it: back in my college days, and before I knew about F/OSS software, I did a report for a COM class (business communications) about a selecting a product for a software development project's usage (the report was the proposal of what to use, how much it would cost, resources required to operate, etc). In the report, I analyzed several different products, both F/OSS (again, not familiar with the idea and philosophy) and proprietary, and chose to recommend a commercial product. CVS was one of the FSS products, but because it was 'free,' I interpreted that to mean cheap, and thus a risk not worth taking.
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