"Open" has as many problems as "free" in English (other languages have different problems).
In education, "open" has been used to mean both "free as in speech" for "Open Educational Resources" and "free as in bheer" for "Massive Open Online Courses". Trying to re-define "free software" in the minds of the general public to mean software which preserves freedom is, in my opinion, a lost cause, unfortunately. The normal meaning of free in English encompasses both libre and gratis and trying to get people to restrict their usage to libre, when they're more used to gratis is highly unlikely to work. Unfortunate, but I'd rather use a less familiar term with fewer "ordinary usage" overloadings - trying to explain software freedoms and why they matter is hard enough without starting people off with a confusion between what FSF-types call "free software" and what most people understand as "free software". I have some interesting results from a survey of Japanese, Korean and Chinese subjects about what they believe they know about Free Software, and what it is. Many people think they understand what "Free Software" means, but their answers as to what pieces of software are "free software" bizarrely includes things like Microsoft Windows and Office (proprietary, non-gratis), Adobe Acrobat Reader (proprietary, gratis) and LibreOffice (libre, gratis). -- Professor Andrew A Adams [email protected] Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
