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Most often, I say FOSS when talking to other folks in our community. It covers all the bases and everyone knows what it means around here.
I've never used "Libre" and I never hear it used, outside of software names like LibreOffice.
For outsiders, I don't use "free software." People hear "free" and only think it refers to the price. I don't care too much for the debate between "free" and "Open source," I get the distinction, but I think compromise is necessary if we want to have any hope of moving people away from proprietary software.
If I only stuck to GNU-style free software, I would never have switched away from proprietary software. If you want to do more than just write text emails and play 5 games ever, you have to move away from "pure" free software.
That being said, I use mostly FOSS software on all my platforms. All my computers and servers run Linux. My cell phone uses GrapheneOS. I self host almost all my services like Jellyfin and my TrueNAS. I'm a massive FOSS advocate, and I push hard against proprietary software all the time.
I think "free" is okay. If the software does come at no upfront cost, then fine, why not add that as an incentive to get people on board. They will figure out how to "pay back" sooner or later.
I can tell you a word I do avoid, and that is "alternative". It makes FLOSS items sound like cheap knockoffs, always playing catch-up with their supposed proprietary and closed equivalents, always seeking feature parity, but never really getting as good as the original. This is not the case. Most software projects, once they reach maturity, more often than not, evolve into their own thing.
Yeah, I shy away from "alternative" for the same reasons.
I now say stuff like, "Protonmail is an email service that respects your privacy and runs fast in your browser." Get them moved off MS and Goog.
You can also turn things on its head, like
"Krita supports a wide range of tablets and drawing devices out of the box, so you won't miss expensive closed proprietary alternatives like Photoshop one bit".
👆 improvised, but you get the idea. You get to reference something the user may know (and this helps you out giving them a clear idea of what you are talking about), and you cast "the alternative" (Photoshop) in a less positive light than the free/libre software at the same time.
"Paranoid", "Pointless", "Basement", "Obsessive", "Hackers", "nerds".
It is still a very very very very marginal and marginalyzed topic unless your social cyrcle is a very specific one.
In my experience the positive and/or effective ones are "GDPR", "Snowden", "Surveillance", "Freedom"...
Why all the down votes? Did I miss something? It is a correct statement. In most circles people have no idea what you are talking about, and then only a few finally get it when you start mentioning Snowden, Privacy or Surveillance.
Oh, OK, I didn't see that, but maybhagr something to do with English not being my native language. Also, the fact that we're paranoid, and we are, does not mean we're not being followed. And pointless?, I find it much more pointless to pay for software to spy on you, and then get hooked on a subscription that was supposed to have every feature included when you "bought" the software.
My favorite word, bar none, is "proprietary". There's no word I use or enjoy more when exposing the beauty and satisfaction of using everything that is NOT!
