Bjarni Ingi Gislason <bjarn...@rhi.hi.is> writes:
> b) They use themselves the wording illegal/legal (and do not really
> know (understand) why), continue to use it (and do not really know
> (understand) why), and do not state this from the beginning and in all
> their contributions thereafter.
> What would a teacher of the English language, writing, or literature
> say about this? What do you (plural) expect, want him to do (say)?
> Is such use semantically correct?
Yes. Illegal has multiple meanings in common English usage, one of which
is "prohibited by accepted rules." WordNet, for example, says:
>From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
illegal
adj 1: prohibited by law or by official or accepted rules; "an
illegal chess move" [ant: {legal}]
The FSF's position on this is very nit-picky from an English language
perspective, and is splitting a hair that doesn't really exist in common
usage. They are doing this for partly political reasons: it's a method to
draw attention to the abuse of copyright law. Not everyone shares this
motive or wants to try to nit-pick this detail of language usage and may
view this as intrusive and irritating.
> What (specific) harm do you expect them to do? What harm have other
> false positives (negatives) from "lintian" done? Are they still doing
> it?
Lintian maintenance in general tries to avoid false positives because too
high of a level of false positives lead people to stop running a lint
program completely, which then significantly reduces its usefulness to the
project as a whole.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
