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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a bit extreme trying to change words to adhere to your own worldview and makes real discussions impossible. There's nothing wrong e.g. with speaking about BSD-like licenses, if you don't see a lack of copyleft as a flaw. This list even kind of reminds me even of Newspeak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak).

So let me try to find something similar from a different perspective:

Copyleft Free Software: You may not be able to use copyleft licensed code together with code licensed under a different license. Better words are CDDL-proprietary or GPL-proprietary. An example in a sentence: ZFS can't be integrated into Linux because Linux is GPL-proprietary.

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Yes, RMS's obsession with clever wordplay is really a great example of Newspeak. It's always bothered me, but I hadn't made the connection to 1984 until you said it. This frustrates me, since he's otherwise fighting a good fight, but the rhetoric is marginalizing.

A little bit of wordplay is charming, but RMS just takes it so far.

Then what alternative would you propose? The terms of the debate have been defined by totalitarians who themselves use Newspeak to get people to accept their systems. By disrupting the language, RMS makes dissent thinkable.

Is this using the RMS definition of "totalitarian", which makes moral judgements on the great evil of not releasing the source code to your software on very specific terms, or the one used by most of the world in reference to government institutions?

Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting.

Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux".

Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided only because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet.

The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago.

"Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're ensuring that the computer works in your interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC.

Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly-unnecesary noise to get it across.

Trying to avoid the weeds that so many other people have argued, so:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google.

And your point is...?

You do not win the culture wars by using words defined by totalitarians. People who have no respect for others’ freedoms.

You live in a parallel version of Earth I'd like to inhabit if you think the FSF is winning any culture battles, let alone wars.

They are winning battles. Back when they started, nobody thought software deserved to be free. Bill Gates published a letter where he asserted that nobody should use Microsoft software without paying Microsoft, and only Microsoft had the privilege of improving it. 30 years later, Microsoft releases a lot of stuff under the Apache 2.0 license. If you were not connected to the past, you would not recognize how huge this is.

And yet, Microsoft's releases are done under APL2, not GPL. I'd argue that that the FSF is culturally irrelevant - the hacker mindset (and so the sharing one) would exist with or without RMS.

That quote continues,

... But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

That is a false dichotomy. I don’t agree with every definition that RMS provides, but I agree with the legitimacy of his effort.

I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”/“cracker” thing, that effort is a lost cause that he just won’t let go, but it’s useful to preserve as a time capsule of the cultural events that led to our current state. There have been multiple complaints that computing is a pop culture, with no sense of the past or the future. RMS is connected to both past and future.

Then what alternative would you propose?

Hmm. I'm not really sure, as I'm certainly not a rhetorical pro. But I feel like defining new negative terms and discussing them, rather than re-casting other terms, would be a good start.

The "Trusted Computing" example mentioned in the article and in a child comment is a good one to look at, I think. "Trusted Computing" sounds Orwellian to start with; as the rule of thumb goes, if you need to put an adjective in the name, it's probably not true [0]. So eschewing "Trusted Computing" makes good sense, but re-casting it as "Treacherous Computing" is goofy, and just sounds like a snide and kinda pathetic attack. Maybe it'd be better to create a new positive name ("Verifiable Computing", say) and discuss how it's better than "Trusted Computing"?

[0] cf. "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, German "Democratic" Republic, "United" States of America, Computer "Science"

A (very small) few of these are responses to common Newspeak found in the industry. For instance, RMS insists on calling DRM "Digital Restriction Management".

.. A much more evocative and accurate title. You don't put DRM on something to make it more open, you put DRM on something to restrict it. The name itself is inherently weaseley, this inversion actually calls it what it accomplishes. Besides, nothing is lost, since the initialism is more common in everyday usage.

But a great deal of it is just tiresome pedantry.

I think this is a bit extreme trying to change words to adhere to your own worldview

Not really, considering that the "meanings" of words in everyday usage have already been deliberately reconstructed and promulgated by the billion-dollar PR engines of the tech industry. For example, how does the word "theft" possibly apply to a person sitting minding his own business on his own computer? It doesn't, so don't use it that way.

Which concepts you lump together under a single word, and which you split between different words, is important and also highly subjective - or transjective if you will (shared reality) - but it's a fallacy to think the delineation of concepts is an "objective" distinction.

For certain entrenched powers, it's useful to lump together carjackers with music downloaders into a single category ("thieves"). Others find it useful to distinguish, and avoid using the same word. Similarly, some find it useful to distinguish between licenses which are promote freedom, vs those which encumber freedom - rather than using a blanket term "BSD-like" that includes both.

You have to admit that they are not trying to change the meaning of most of the words on the list, they just want to avoid using them.

Just like Newspeak, where words were removed. Can't say "bad" must use "ungood".

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