We are proud to announce the birth of the Free Silicon Foundation (https://f-si.org)!
We organize a conference in Paris, March 14-16 2019, to promote:
1. Free and Open Source (FOS) CAD tools for designing #VLSI circuits
2. the sharing of hardware designs
3. common standards
4. the freedom of users in the context of #silicon technology
Program and submissions:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php/FSiC2019
@fsi Awesome! What a great initiative :)
PS. Can we please start calling people “people” and not “users”. “User” is an othering. Silicon Valley and surveillance capitalists are extractive corporations and have users. In ethical technology, we are people and we design and develop for our ourselves and for other people. https://ind.ie/ethical-design
@rick_777 @fsi Hey man, I’m no IT person, just a guy who’s been coding since he was 7. Here’s a test: replace user with person and see how often it works and how much more humane it seems. Again, I’m not an IT person but we use person in all our code comments and documentation and marketing at @indie and it works great for us. But, take all this with a huge pinch of salt because I’m definitely not an IT person. Whatever the fuck that is.
You're right that corporate environments use the word more often, but it's our of necessity rather than for dehumanizing reasons.
Imagine a point of sale software: There's the client (the guy who pays to make the software), which is not the same as the customer, whom the sales people give attention to. And the salespeople are the users, because it's them who use the software - 1/3
@aral @fsi @indie
And when we're talking about libraries and APIs, the user is the programmer who uses the libraries to build stuff, but the end user is the person who uses the software made by the programmers.
So you can see, there's a difference between client, customer, API/library user and end-user - 2/3
@aral @fsi @indie Most of the time, there's only one kind of user, so user and end-user is the same thing. But there need to be terms to differentiate, to avoid ambiguities and misunderstandings. - 3/3