Hi, On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Sundaram Ramachandran < [email protected]> wrote:
> > rms till date couldn't find a suitable > > alternative to free, though he agrees with mis-interpretation it raises. > > I think RMS is full of mischief. He never cared for Corporates, but only > for small users and the society. So I feel he purposely used the word > "Free" to make it attractive to the layman. In India and anywhere, people > will travel by car spending Rs. 100/- on petrol to save Rs.50/- on some > purchase if there is a "Free" offer. > > I think I have some solid evidence for my claim that RMS is mischievous: > > Consider the word "GNU" - initially it was pronounced as "New", so as to > make it more appealing. > In the actual word "gnu" which means an African antelope, 'g' is silent and so its pronunciation is similar to 'new'. To make the word GNU (that refers to the OS), it is pronounced like "Gah-nu". You can notice RMS stressing the "Gah" part in his pronunciation of GNU. > > And consider the word "Hurd" which he used for his 'free' kernel project. > It is very easy to confuse Hurd with Herd; in order to encourage the Herd > mentality of the computing masses. > > So although RMS claims Free stands for Freedom, it is only the second or > third meaning in the dictionary. The attempt is not to clarify, but to > purposely and mischievously mislead to misinterpret. > Ok, let it be. You have a better term to replace "free"? If you have one, we can at least ask him why he didn't choose that. Btw, puns and figures of speech are common in UNIX commands also. It can be seen from the commands "more" and "less", "fsck", etc. -- Vignesh Nandha Kumar _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
