as much as i like richard stallman he has some weird personality quirks and one of the weirdest quirks is that words mean what he tells you that words mean ignore how people are actually using them if he says this is the meaning then this is the meaning this is how we got things like free software which is a very confusing term that should have never existed that means free of charge which is the way that the vast majority of the world actually uses it and then what the free software movement uses it as which is freedom respecting and this led to an interesting article on the gnu website titled words to avoid or use with care because they're loaded or confusing the problem though is a lot of the alternatives he provides are actually worse than the original term there are 54 words on this list so obviously we're not going through everything today and a lot of the words i actually do agree with but we're going to go through some of them and if people like this style of video i'm more than happy to do a sequel so the first word we have is ad blocker the argument here is that when a program blocks ads ad blocker is a perfectly reasonable term but in the case of the gnu icecat browser it's not just blocking ads it's blocking things that track the user so a better term for this is surveillance protection now i don't think i've ever heard anyone refer to this as surveillance protection but i do agree that ad blocker isn't really the best term for this surveillance protection on the other hand isn't a great term either are you protecting the surveillance or are you being protected from the surveillance plus we already have a term for this it's called a tracker blocker it's a much more general term and people already use it next is the word alternative but not as a general term don't refer to free software as an alternative to proprietary software because the word presumes that all alternatives are legitimate and each additional one makes the users better off in effect it assumes that free software ought to coexist with software that does not respect users freedoms but this is not what the word alternative means whatsoever alternative simply means it's something else besides what you're currently using a bed of nails is an alternative to shoes is it a good alternative absolutely not and the same applies here free software is a good alternative maybe it's the best alternative but it's still an alternative you can't just pretend like the other things don't exist next is the word asset to refer to published works as assets or digital assets is even worse than calling them content it presumes they have no value to society except commercial value now that certainly is one of the meanings of the word asset a valuable thing or person but asset has another meaning and that is a useful thing or person and the type of use isn't encapsulated within the definition so this could be a personal use it could be a commercial use it could be an artistic use a medical use an educational use all of these things would be encapsulated under the word asset it's not just a commercial use next is bsd style license and i'm not bringing this one up because i disagree this one i'm bringing up because i fully agree with it and i feel like more people actually need to make this distinction so the bsd license is a licensed family it's like saying a gpl style license that doesn't just refer to one single license it could be gpl v2 gpl v3 a gpl lgpl and all of these licenses while they do have a core set of similarities that make them a part of the same family they are fundamentally different licenses so instead of referring to it as a bsd style license or a gpl style license or later on down the line he mentions creative commons as well and makes the exact same point refer to it as the specific license that the project is under and that is much much clearer and people actually understand what you are talking about in the past i've certainly fallen for this trap and now i try to be more clear in what license i am actually referring to occasionally i still will make mistakes but i'm trying to improve on that next is a really interesting one because i partially agree with it but i still think it produces more confusion than is really necessary and that is for closed describing non-free software as closed clearly refers to open source in the free software movement we do not want to be confused with the open source camp so we are careful to avoid saying things that encourage people to lump us in with them for instance we avoid describing non-free software as closed we call it non-free or proprietary i fully understand wanting to separate out these two movements they have fundamentally different goals many of which conflict with each other the problem that i have is with the term non-free because if you're talking to someone who knows about the free software movement they will know exactly what you mean by non-free what you mean is proprietary software if you're talking to someone who doesn't know about the free software movement maybe they even do know about open source but they've never heard of the movement saying non-free isn't going to give you the meaning you think it's going to give you it's going to mean the software has a price tag do not say the term non-free use proprietary it is much much clearer honestly i would love if the free software movement just changed their name i don't think it's ever going to happen because stallman is convinced that free software means what he says free software means now we have cloud computing a term that i really really despise alongside big data it doesn't mean anything it is just a marketing buzzword when marketing teams can't really be bothered asking the development team what they are actually doing because cloud computing doesn't refer to any one thing it can refer to software as a service where you access say google docs for example it can refer to renting out a physical or virtual server it can refer to accessing a server that you own it can refer to accessing someone else's server it can refer to any and all of these things all at the exact same time it doesn't tell you anything about the tech stack it doesn't tell you anything about the security the privacy anything like that it is just cloud computing it's a big fluffy cloud you can't see inside of it it's just doing things instead of doing that talk about what is actually happening these different computing practices don't even belong in the same discussion the best way to avoid the confusion the term cloud computing spreads is to not use the term cloud in connection with computing talk about the scenario you mean and call it by a specific term next is copyright owner copyright is an artificial privilege handed out by the state to achieve a public interest and lasting a period of time not a natural right like owning a house or a shirt lawyers used to recognize this by referring to the recipient of that privilege as a copyright holder please join us in resisting by using the traditional term copyright holders instead now i can fully get behind using copyright holder instead of copyright owner where i disagree is in the reasoning specifically this part right here now this isn't a politics channel i'm not going to get too deep into politics but natural rights are a meme and don't exist i know the anarchists are probably in the comment section right now telling me how wrong i am but all ownership is given by the state or the largest force if you're on a deserted island sure natural rights can exist but if you're around other people without the threat of force there is absolutely nothing stopping people from just taking your stuff ownership doesn't exist without that threat of force generally the threat of force comes from a state usually in the form of a police force or some sort of military intervention where if you break the rules set by the state you will have some sort of action taken against you maybe you're the largest sort of force in that area in which case you can assign the people in that area whatever rights you want next i want to talk about creator the term creator as applied to authors implicitly compares them to a deity as in the creator the term is used by publishers to elevate authors moral standing above that of ordinary people in order to justify giving them increased copyright power which the publishers can then exercise in their name now maybe at some point people looked at the term creator as being some higher term that puts you above regular people but at this point the term has been so watered down that creator and author basically are just interchangeable words if i say this person is the creator of a book and this person is the author of a book you're gonna sort of have the exact same understanding about what they did and there's no way you can use the term creator to elevate someone's moral standing to have increased copyright power author gives you that exact same level of power changing the word out doesn't do anything there the last one i want to talk about is digital goods the term digital goods as applied to copies of works of authorship identifies them with physical goods which cannot be copied and which therefore have to be manufactured in quantity and sold now this very much depends on how you define manufacturing because creating a copy of a jpeg even though the cost of that is very very tiny there is still some cost to it there's going to be a couple of cpu cycles a bit of electricity some wear on your hard drive and that while being a very very small cost is still a form of cost and then we get into the issue of how do we define authorship is authorship something that has to be a creative work or is it simply something that requires an amount of labor because in the case of say a bitcoin a bitcoin cannot be copied but it does require labor to actually create so is this a work of authorship or is it not i can't answer that it very much depends on your definition of authorship i'm not sure where i exactly stand on that and i think because of that the term digital goods just makes more sense to go with there's some words on here that i skipped past that i do disagree with but i feel like deserve their own dedicated video things like consume consumer content and creator i might get around to that at some point but i'm not entirely sure if you like this style of video and you want me to do another one there are certainly a lot of fun words left on this list things like foss freely available for free freeware things like that which i uh would very much like to talk about so if you want to see another video let me know in the comment section down below and if it does well i guess i'll do another one that'll be everything for me and before i go i would like to thank my supporters so a special thank you to joachim donald logan michael andrew mitchell nathan david carl will brennan chica bender jamie joseph josh michael peters steven t through tonight's usha and all of my title supporters if you'd like to go and support the links down below to my patreon are live repair that sort of stuff i've got my podcast tech over tea available basically anywhere i've got a gaming channel called brody ups and plays where i live stream twice a week and this channel is available over on odyssey that'll be everything for me and i'm out