Hi,

A good reason to stay out of discussions would be if we were to consider that we have nothing to add that could improve them. A bad reason would be because the subject matter strains the limits of subjective human incredulity.

I don't think that  J.B. Nicholson's argument rests on whether RMS said something or not. The position is capable of being interrogated in isolation, but it doesn't do the position any harm in quoting from a notable source on the philosophy of Free Software that appears to support it too.

In short, J.B. Nicholson's argument doesn't succeed or fail on whether we believe RMS is a reliable source on some other subject matter.

I hope that much is obvious.

Open source can be analogized as being 'right wing', and free software as 'left wing' if we accept the established nomenclature of left/right politics with Marxism on the left and capitalism of the right. We also need to be comfortable with the idea that a marxist critique of software tends to emphasize 'freedom' and capitalist discourse tends to emphasize 'development'. Again while we may not wish to commit to these fairly established and broad analogies, if we do, then it all works fine.

I am not sure I understand the demarcation between 'practical benefits' (open source) and 'ethical underpinnings' (free software) when it is being articulated by an idea that 'without the practical benefits, the ethical underpinnings don’t exist either'.

Unless you are a utilitarian, or pragmatic humanist, this idea would sound wrong. The idea that if our ethics are 'impractical' they don't exist wouldn't fit the ontology of many world views.

I am not sure it is possible to realistically discuss nomenclature in isolation from culture either. I think the Open Source movement has quite a few features that differ from the FS movement, for example connections to well-resourced, privately owned stock companies as compared to connections to civic or social organiszations.

FLOSS is fine for presentations to a largely unsophisticated image many audiences have of software design but it fails to fully represent the important differences in motivations between developing free software and open source software.

For a more sophisticated audience, FLOSS as a descriptor obviously doesn't work because Open Source and Free designate very different design goals and therefore, different outcomes.

/ mat