Re: Making Emacs more friendly to newcomers

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > It is just that sometimes, in everyday speech we don't always use
  > official, full, long names for stuff

Since "free software" is only two charactes longer than "open source",
how about making the effort to acquire that habit?  It will help our
cause, and once you learn the habit, you will hardly mind those extra
characters.

  > say Linux even when we mean GNU/Linux, just as we don't always say
  > Microsoft Windows but just Windows, or Apple OSX but just OSX etc.

They are similar in being shortenings, but there is a crucial difference.

Saying just "Windows" does not lead to forgetting that it comes from Microsoft.
Saying just "OSX" does not lead to forgetting that it comes from Apple.
There is no reason to make an effort to avoid those shortenings.

But saying just "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" misrepresents who
developed it.  That hampers what the GNU Project can achieve.  So how
about making the effort to avoid that particular shortening?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)