You Don't Own the Word "Freedom"

Summary

A line-by-line teardown of the most smug, exclusionary comment I’ve gotten since starting this blog—and why the so-called “freedom” they preach looks a lot more like a wall. I woke up this morning to a comment on the first post in the 'I Want to Love Linux' series. Congratulations, random internet user: you earned a full-length blog post in response. Not because you're special, but because your comment is the perfect storm of everything that’s wrong with the self-righteous, gatekeeping corner of this ecosystem—the part that cloaks cruelty in the language of freedom, then acts shocked when people stop showing up. Here’s their full comment. Nothing redacted. No paraphrasing. Just the original smug sermon. Okay, first of all, it’s GNU/Linux, not “Linux.” Ah yes, the sacred GNU/. As if the word “GNU” fixes the system’s failures. Screen reader broken? Audio stack crashed? Don’t worry, it’s GNU/Linux now, all is forgiven! You think a naming convention is more important than disabled users being able to log in. That says everything about where your priorities lie. You keep saying “Linux” like it’s some magic OS that fell from the sky, when in reality it’s just the kernel. And you keep pretending that pointing this out changes anything. It’s a kernel. Great. The problem isn’t confusion over definitions—it’s the lived experience of people getting left behind while you argue semantics and act superior. The real operating system—the one that gives you your shells, your coreutils, your compilers, your sanity—is the GNU system. Sanity? If your idea of sanity is the same duct-taped command line environment we’ve been dragging around for decades, I’d hate to see your definition of chaos. And don’t start waving compilers in my face like they’re an accessibility feature. Most of the stack that matters now isn’t even part of GNU. By not calling it GNU/Linux, you’re erasing the work of decades of free software pioneers who fought tooth and nail so you could sit there whining about thi...