I’m active in circles associated with FSF and I often hear them saying research or academic software or programs must be licensed under GPL to prevent the work from being used in proprietary software.
But as a researcher I think that’s just involving politics in scientific work. I like BSD or MIT for research because it gives more flexibility for the users to use my work in anyway they see fit.
I think restricting my research work removes the point of it if it can’t be used freely by any person for any kind of work.
What do you people think?
No, all beings. But the english language is difficult, sometimes you have to read between the lines and interpet it.
There is he she and it. When talking about someone, you default to he because always using he or she is daunting and does not yield any additional benefit.
Of course we could invent a new word to refer to someone but so far noone has done that. There are attempts to use “they” which dates back centuries but in modern english there is no word for it. Using they introduces another problem because they is plural in modern english.
If you browse my post history, you can see that sometimes I use he and sometimes she. There’s no clear pattern around it.
It’ll take at least another 10 or 20 years until we figured out what to use, if ever. At least english does not suffer from gender word endings like french or german. They have an even bigger problem. At Spanish have an ending for male and one for female but they haven’t solved it either.
If “they” wins, we have to introduce another word for the plural they, otherwise it gets complicated
Maybe we should look into asian languages, I haven’t looked into those too much
I don’t know why you dismiss ‘they’ so easily, as though it’s not a thing people don’t already use when they don’t know someone’s gender
If you want to make it singular like he/she/it, then make it singular.
He has a car, she has a car, they has a car.
He was friendly, she was friendly, they was friendly.
He sounds fine, she sounds fine, they sounds fine.
Notice the issue?
A singular they is an okay concept, but you then have actually allow it to be singular, in every use - a direct replacement for he/she with no other word or sentence changes necessary.
Sure, if English was consistent. But that’s not how people actually speak. And people do use singular ‘they’, that’s not a command or a suggestion, just an observation. It’s only when people think too hard about it that they say things like ‘he or she’, and even after, they often slip back into ‘they’ despite themself.
Because they refers in english to more than one person. Using it for a single person is confusing.
Oftentimes, I can deduct the amount of people from the context but not always and oftentimes you need a lot of context to understand if it is plural or singular.
I simply think that, for me, refering to a generic singular person with a singular gender word is more important than using a generic gender word which is plural.
If someone else wants to use they, she can, but currently not me because everyone understands what I am talking about. It’s just a shortcoming of the english language and is far from valuing males more than females.
Btw: when publishing professionally, I always use “she” because that balances someone using he.
It’s not like singular they is a particularly new thing. And you could have the same issue of plurality being ambiguous with the word ‘you’, but people seem to be able to figure it out.
Why do you want to use “they” and not a new term? Something that is not ambiguous
I’m partial to adapting ‘hen’ from Swedish as singular they, or ‘hän’ from Finnish as a singular pronoun for people which doesn’t indicate gender at all, but I use ‘they’ in English as it’s more widely understood.
I like that
Just because there is already a singular and plural “you” doesn’t justify doing the same mistake again.
Bold of you to deduce the natural evolution of a language is “a mistake.” Next you’ll tell me the sun ought be a little more to the South when it sets, too.