A little bit of wordplay is charming, but RMS just takes it so far.

Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting.

Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux".

Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided only because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet.

The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago.

"Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're ensuring that the computer works in your interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC.

Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly-unnecesary noise to get it across.

I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”/“cracker” thing, that effort is a lost cause that he just won’t let go, but it’s useful to preserve as a time capsule of the cultural events that led to our current state. There have been multiple complaints that computing is a pop culture, with no sense of the past or the future. RMS is connected to both past and future.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google.

... But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.

Hmm. I'm not really sure, as I'm certainly not a rhetorical pro. But I feel like defining new negative terms and discussing them, rather than re-casting other terms, would be a good start.

The "Trusted Computing" example mentioned in the article and in a child comment is a good one to look at, I think. "Trusted Computing" sounds Orwellian to start with; as the rule of thumb goes, if you need to put an adjective in the name, it's probably not true [0]. So eschewing "Trusted Computing" makes good sense, but re-casting it as "Treacherous Computing" is goofy, and just sounds like a snide and kinda pathetic attack. Maybe it'd be better to create a new positive name ("Verifiable Computing", say) and discuss how it's better than "Trusted Computing"?

[0] cf. "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, German "Democratic" Republic, "United" States of America, Computer "Science"

.. A much more evocative and accurate title. You don't put DRM on something to make it more open, you put DRM on something to restrict it. The name itself is inherently weaseley, this inversion actually calls it what it accomplishes. Besides, nothing is lost, since the initialism is more common in everyday usage.

But a great deal of it is just tiresome pedantry.

Not really, considering that the "meanings" of words in everyday usage have already been deliberately reconstructed and promulgated by the billion-dollar PR engines of the tech industry. For example, how does the word "theft" possibly apply to a person sitting minding his own business on his own computer? It doesn't, so don't use it that way.

Which concepts you lump together under a single word, and which you split between different words, is important and also highly subjective - or transjective if you will (shared reality) - but it's a fallacy to think the delineation of concepts is an "objective" distinction.

For certain entrenched powers, it's useful to lump together carjackers with music downloaders into a single category ("thieves"). Others find it useful to distinguish, and avoid using the same word. Similarly, some find it useful to distinguish between licenses which are promote freedom, vs those which encumber freedom - rather than using a blanket term "BSD-like" that includes both.