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12/30/2005: "The Eric S. Raymond Rick-Moen-author-credit-remover-o-matic"

ESR claims that "open source" is a more popular term than "free software".

I collect statistics on the Web usage of the terms "open source" and "free software", and show evidence for the following:
Among software developers and in the technology trade press, use of the term "open source" dominates use of the term "free software" by 95%-5% or more.
On the general Web, the ratio is 80%-20% or more.
The gratis/libre ambiguity in the term "free software" produces about an 80% false-positive rate in Web searches. After 20 years of advocacy, "free software" is still effectively synonymous with "freeware".
Use of the term "free software" is in long-term decline, and older or obsolete pages form a larger part of its share than for "open source".


I find it amusing that Eric "McCarthy was actually right" Raymond is practicing Stalinist Revisionism. Witness:

"how to ask questions the smart way yeilds "about 173,000 results" while
.vs
how to ask questions the smart way -moen yeilds "about 170,000" results.

Nick Moffitt was there and reports that "Rick pulled probably the lion's share of the labor on that HOWTO", yet Google reports almost 60 times as many references to the paper without any credit to Rick. Put in terms of ESR's statistics, the variant(s) of the paper which do not give claim or credit to Rick show up (in Google) over 98% of the time.

In the "smart questions" queries, the truth is not fairly represented by the results.

I find it highly probable that something quite similar has occurred in the use of the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source".