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Missing punctuation

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This should be "free-software license" instead of "free software license" because "free software" is a compound modifier to the noun "license" in the English language. "free software license" refers to a software license that is free, whereas "free-software license" refers to a license for a type of software (free software). Additional confusion arises when discussing paid free-software licenses, and free free-software licenses ("paid free software licenses" and "free free software licenses" are particularly-confusing phrases). LordOfPens (talk) 17:01, 7 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Please see the complementary discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_209#Hyphenation_should_not_be_prescriptive LordOfPens (talk) 20:17, 28 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 30 April 2020

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Moved; with respect to Ahecht, it is pretty clear that the term "free software" is used, in this case, as a compound modifier; that is, the article is about libre license for "free software", not a licence for gratis "free software". Indeed, as K4rolB and SMcCandlish point out, libre licenses have been used in prior discussions about compound modifiers in the first place; i.e., "free-software licence" succinctly removes the ambiguity that the lack of a hyphen creates. Additionally, given how much I swear by Tony1's writing guide to this day, I am minded to pay attention to him on matters of grammar and syntax. Sceptre (talk) 00:47, 19 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]


Free software license → Free-software license – MOS:HYPHEN (the term is actually correctly hyphenated in the text, but not in the title). Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 16:18, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is a contested technical request. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 18:13, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Common usage is without the hyphen, as it is a free license for software, not a license for free software (see gnu.org, fsf.org). "Free software" is not a compound modifier in this case. --Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 16:58, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • From that GNU list, it seems to me that they really treat "free software" as a compound modifier (and do not hyphenate compound modifiers in general). For example, in "free software license" they always link the whole "free software" part instead of just "free". They also write either "[non-]copyleft free software license", "free software, copyleft license" or "free software license, copyleft", but never "free[,] copyleft software license". That is, they never split the "free software" part. There are also examples of "GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses" such that "a module covered by [one license] and a module covered by [another license] cannot legally be linked together", indicating that this is really about "a license for free software" rather than a truly "free license". — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 00:31, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, Per Ahecht. lethargilistic (talk) 18:52, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, Per Ahecht. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:39, 30 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Support, although, there's already an interesting read from MoS talk page linked earlier. – K4rolB (talk) 08:44, 1 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Then why oppose? LordOfPens and SMcCandlish also provided reasonable arguments for hyphenation. And nobody there disagreed with the fact that "free-software" is a compound modifier of "license" (I don't know why Ahecht thinks that it is "free license for software", but this misunderstanding suggests that the hyphen is actually needed). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 16:36, 3 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • By the way, K4rolB, how do you explain this? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 12:39, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
      • Damn, you're good. Frankly, there wasn't much thought put into that revert – it was grammatically incorrect – bam! – reverted. I put more thought into this discussion and I didn't feel like the name change was necessary. In the first draft of this answer I went on and on why I believed it shouldn't be hyphenated, did some reading again and then I realized I misread what SMcCandlish actually meant writing about dropping hyphen is software and car journalism in that link earlier (his post in this thread helped, too). I also thought that it's not probable to misunderstand the name as gratis license for software. Maybe I've spent too much time in free software community to appreciate how exotic the name really is. – K4rolB (talk) 16:40, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
        Yep, it's the inverse form of the Dunning–Kruger effect: people deeply steeped in a topic are often unclear on the understanding level of others who are not so well-versed. Part of our "job" as encyclopedists is to re-train ourselves to "think like a newbie" at everything (and like a school child, and like a learner of English as a second language, and like a little old lady, etc.). If you look at various examples of field-specific technical writing (e.g. in medical journals, law reviews, technical RFCs, and so on), you'll find that the writers of them habitually avoid hyphenation of jargon terms in their own field even when used adjectively and in ways that would be seriously confusing to non-experts; they do this because the terms are "transparent" units to their exact audience for the piece, for whom the hyphens don't serve much of a clarifying function in those particular terms. Journalism tends to drop hyphens for the same reason they drop other punctuation and also lean toward clipped wording: expediency in meeting deadlines and in making text more easily rearrangeable by an editor.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:54, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong oppose - what?? Red Slash 22:52, 2 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, per MOS:HYPHEN and just for basic clarity. Without the hyphen, it appears to imply "software licenses" that are "free" (i.e., legal paperwork that does not cost money). What it really means is "licensing" of "free software", which has more to do with libre than gratis. In this construction, "free software" is not only a compound modifier of "license", it is also a special conceptual unit (a term of art, "free software") that synergistically means much more than "software" and "free" by themselves would imply. Given that "software license" is also a term of art that is regularly used synonymously with "serial number"/"license code", the unhyphenated "free software license" can also be easily misinterpreted as "a give-away copy of some normally expensive commercial software" (e.g. the many millions of Windows 10 licenses given away since 2015 as an upgrade incentive from Win7 and Win8, a potentially encyclopedic topic). The opposers above are engaging in the WP:Common-style fallacy. WP doesn't care what non-encyclopedic writing styles do stylistically, and this matters twice over here, because both journalism and technical writing tend to avoid hyphenation more than other writing styles, and those are the two non-WP styles most likely to mention this topic in a reliable source.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:02, 5 May 2020 (UTC); revised 18:59, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong support after checking the article to be sure it's about a license for free software, not about a software license that's free. This is what the hyphen is for in English. And it has been stable that way in the article lead for months at least (I didn't check how far back). Dicklyon (talk) 23:23, 5 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • OpposeSupport—as long as the thrust of the meaning is free software and not free license. Tony (talk) 23:44, 5 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Tony1: huh? Did you read this wrong? Dicklyon (talk) 00:49, 6 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Towards resolution

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@Ahecht, Lethargilistic, and Headbomb: from this and the previous discussions it seems that your interpretation is incorrect, and the title must be hyphenated to avoid such misunderstanding. If you still hold your opinion, please support it with arguments other than "common usage" (which is irrelevant, as clarified above) and explain why the supporters' arguments are wrong. Otherwise, I suggest to proceed with the proposed renaming. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 18:04, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Open-source license

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I've been improving open-source license and as a result took a look at this article. I sort of get why free software and open-source software/open source could be different articles, but I'm not so clear on why this article is separate. Additionally, large sections of this article lack sources and there are statements that appear-to my knowledge-false. What is the goal of this article as distinct from the OSL page? Rjjiii (talk) 04:27, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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