@xianc78 @RustyCrab @ooignignoktoo @sun >but the other part of the reason why there was a split was because people thought that Stallman was simply advocating for freeware, due to the name confusion.
No-one who ever has actually listened to Stallman has left thinking he advocates for freeware - he very clearly states that free means freedom and defines free software in his talks.

People often make the assumption that you're referring to gratis software, but such confusion is very easily corrected by simply stating something along the lines of; "Remember that in English free means freedom and not gratis no matter the dishonesty of advertisers." and no listener will every make the same mistake again (you simply cannot forget the GNUish eye glint of freedom).

Meanwhile, "open source" makes for a much worse assumption, almost every single person (including "open source" supporters) I've come across has assumed that it means that the source is publicly available (as that is the natural meaning of the term and the original meaning of "open source intelligence") and there is no way to correct that assumption with a single sentence - it would take a 20 minute explanation going over the "osd" (few "open source" supports have seen that document) as well as the free software definition for anyone to get it - so what happens in practice is that the mistake continues to proliferate.


The main reason why "open source" was defined as ESR and others had a problem with freedom; http://catb.org/~esr/open-source.html

Of course the writing is very dishonest - ESR knew that free means freedom and the FSF has always pointed that out in their "propaganda", but of course he claimed that such is "very ambiguous"

The true reason is of course carefully put into the second place; "Second, the term makes a lot of corporate types nervous." - all ESR was interested is was getting funding from corporate types to allow for higher quality software, faster, no matter the consequences.

>I'd argue that there wouldn't be a split if Stallman simply called it the "Libre Software Movement".
There would have been a subversion all the same, as corporate types do not like people ever even hearing that software freedom is a thing, no matter what word is used to describe it.

By all means say libre or whatever free in your language is, if you're too afraid to say that free means freedom, as it has the same meaning after all.