Freetards

[Tankgunk]

I generally don't give myself names

Same here, although I much prefer OSX for daily use, and linux for servers. But I don't buy any software aside from an occasional game (only one game to date) or OSX upgrade (usually from my school anyway, I do tech work for them).

So M$ users are Paytards?

Yes.

 

[roisin and mac]

I'd never heard of it before now (always nice to learn new things!) I still probably wouldn't use it precisely because it sounds like it's a badge of honor kind of thing, unless I came to be a part of that group, where I would use it to refer to myself and others like me. But it's a fun word, I like the self-deprecating tone of it

Interesting poll!

 

[Decrepit]

So, does anyone else use the word "freetards" to refer to Linux users?

I may not read FSJ often (actually I've only ever read it once or twice,) but I really love the phrase he made popular... "Linux Freetards".

I've been using Linux since it was made available on floppy disk images back on an MIT FTP site in 1992.

And I've never heard the term related to Linux users.

And it was only this week that I heard the term at all from somebody who didn't believe that they should ever have to pay for something that somebody else spent time creating.

 

[Evangelion]

Freetards == (usually) Linux users who never use software that must be paid for, regardless of how much more useful or efficient it may be compared to the free alternative

"free" in "free software" does not refer to price, but freedom. And some people think that having some short-term "efficency" is not worth the long-term lock-in that results from that "efficiency". The world is full of stories how some company went bankrupt, leaving their users in the cold. The world is full of stories of products that were simply discontinued, while users were simply told to upgrade to some other version. The world is full of stories of how company starts to extract every available penny from their customers, because the customer can't change their software, since they are too deeply invested in that particular software.

There are a lot of people who think that avoiding those situations is worth a lot more than any possible short-term "efficiency-boost" proprietary software might give them. They see proprietary software as handcuffs. At best, they might be golden handcuffs, but they would still be handcuffs. Now, you might disagree with that, but it doesn't really make their view on the matter wrong.

Now, I'm a Mac-user. But before I went to Mac, I used Linux, and I have started to get this feeling that I should go back to Linux. No, I probably would not leave Mac entirely, I would just move from one main OS to two main OS'es.

And the thing is that I see no need for animosity between Mac-users and Linux-users. Macs have benefitted TRENDEMOUSLY from free software, and I have a feeling that it's a lot easier for Linux to interoperate with Macs than it would be to interoperate with Windows. In many ways, there are more similarities between Linux-users and Mac-users. For starters: both groups are passionate about their platform of choice. Have you ever met someone who is a "passionate Windows-user"? I sure as hell haven't.