> ....but its widely recognized and less confusing than free software... that
> being that its free as in cheap low quality crap, and not free as in you
> wont be emotionally and phisically raped by a computer holding its software
> over your head.

I dont know about that.  Perhaps in the media.

> I would imagine that it would be acceptable to sling the open source
> terminology around and still be comfortable in recommending free, but closed
> source solutions to peoples problems.

I dont know how likely that is to happen.  I think 
it would be more common for it to go the other 
way.  Where as by slinging the term Open Source 
software around you end up with open source code 
but non free usage to it, in which case it is 
pretty much useless.

Sun, Netscape and Apple are all examples of 
companies that have 'opened' code, but not made it 
free enough to be useful, by stating you are only 
interested in Open Source you are encouraging 
this, but from the sounds of the philosphy of the 
group perhaps it is what you want to encourage?

It just seems odd coming from a group organized to 
meet about a free operating system GNU\Linux that 
is compromised on nearly 85%+ free software on 
nearly every distribution.

Derek Neighbors
derek@gnu.org