[Fsf-friends] KDE vs GNOME war

[Harish Narayanan]

Sandip Bhattacharya wrote:

>
>I find this quite amusing, you keep harping on freedom, and free software, but 
>conveniently dont mention the fact that a significant effort of Gnome is 
>being spent on development using Mono, which is based on a non-free language!
>  
>
Now why would I harp on details that counter my own stand? Also, this
"significant effort" you describe is mostly fuelled by one company,
Novell. Many people don't care for it. But that's the beauty of language
bindings isn't it?

Additionally, as far as I can tell, most of Mono is developed to
published ECMA CLI specifications (however patent encumbered they may
be, I don't know).

Either way, I won't defend it because I don't think it is entirely
"non-tainted" either. Plus I personally am not a fan for all these
trendy new fangled languages. I am quite old school.

>You even mentioned "beagle" (written in C#) in a reply on this thread!
>  
>
Yes, in error. But to my defense, it wasn't in the original reply.

>And please, it irritates me no end when people misuse the purely english word 
>"free". 
>
You must have great fun being on FSF mailing lists. Actually, kidding
aside, I looked up 'free' in dictionaries
[http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=free]. The results from the
first dictionary on that page defines free 'as in gratuitious' as the
7th meaning. Read the others.

The problem is not misuse of a "pure English" word 'free', but the
overloading in its original definition, so to speak. (This is a somewhat
geeky mailing list after all.)

>If you mean the GNU definition of Freedom, please at least spell 
>"free" with a capital F (e.g. Free), so that people can distinguish it from 
>the common english meaning of the term  - "free" (meaning something which is 
>available without *any* strings, regardless of whether these strings are for 
>public good). Otherwise, the GNU litreature will continue to seem puzzling to 
>many lay people. We already have a very difficult time explaining this to 
>newcomers at LUG meets (and no, talking about Free Beer doesnt work very well 
>in schools and colleges ;) )
>  
>
True, I did maintain some consistency initially, but got lax with the
capitalization later on. And free beer doesn't resonate with me either,
so I've preferred sticking to "free as in press" and "free as in no
cost" when I try to explain things.

Harish

Harish