FSFE President Urges Community To Strengthen Open Source As a Brand

Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of 'Free Software' vs 'Open Source.' Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focusing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should rein in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."

Comments

Re:The Meaning Of "Free"

[TheRaven64]

I prefer Hippyware. Free Software is ambiguous because people think it means software-that-you-don't-pay-for. Open Source is ambiguous because people think it means software-with-source-code-you-can-see (but not necessarily have any right to modify or redistribute). Open Source is also bad marketing, because most people don't care about the source code (although they may care, from a business standpoint, about the associated benefits of having certain rights to the source code).

In contrast, no one I've spoken to has ever misinterpreted Hippyware. People either know what it means, or they ask. They never walk around thinking it means one thing when it means something else, a problem that both Open Source and Free Software share. Software Libre also works, but Hippyware rolls off the tongue a lot better.

Re:Okies

[johnlcallaway]

Except no on hears the name calling other than people like Greve. I don't hear it, because I'm not involved in it.

And since the large majority of people that use open source are also not involved in it, fixing it won't necessarily translate into additional users.

The two main reasons that companies I have worked in don't use open source software is either because they want a paid technician on the other end of the phone, or it was felt the quality wasn't as good.

I suggest Mr. Greve expend his energy on overcoming those two issues if he wants to expand the acceptance of open source software. One only has to wade through the mountains of crap on SourceForge to question whether it is worth the effort to search for the good stuff that surpasses commercial options, or just go buy something.