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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
Even the average tech person doesn’t know what it means.
The term was coined by Christine Peterson of the Free software movement, and is defined to specify software that is free and open source (FOSS).
This was after problems with the term “free software” because it was a bad term, that was hijacked to also include software free of cost but closed and proprietary, so far from open source. And free was not generally understood as free as in libre.
After the Free software movement coined the term. The Free Software Foundation also adopted it, and to distinguish they called it FLOSS, for “Free as in Libre and Open Source Software”, where the libre means that the code is protected from being “jailed” because it has a so called strong copyleft license, like for instance GPL. So MIT, BSD and public domain are not FLOSS but they are FOSS.
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software
/Nothing in this life is simple.