On 10/5/07, Karsten Wade <kwade(a)redhat.com> wrote:
<snip>
If you said to me, "Freedom is a feature of our school," I
would
understand that meaning without knowing the CS-specific context. Why
wouldn't that apply to the usage in Fedora?
In other words, knowing the CS-specific meaning adds depth to the
understanding of the slogan, but not knowing the CS-specific meaning
doesn't detract from the slogan.
Likewise, a variant on "freedom is a feature" is
"Freedom is a feature, not a bug".
If that is hard to translate due to CS jargon, then it can be
expressed (in English) as
"Freedom is a feature, not a flaw",
which, I believe, conveys pretty much the same meaning with nice alliteration.
What is lost is the play on words from the common jargon saying,
"It's a feature, not a bug".
The point is that "Freedom is a feature" is a good slogan in that it
translates well and provides fertile ground for further elaboration.
John Babich
Volunteer, Fedora Project