> With commercial software you need to invest time (and money) before start, and after having reached a certain amount of knowledge you can't go further, you have to keep yourself up to date following upstream changes and you new knowledge have a very little value in the long run.

How's that different from learning to how use FOSS? Except the money investment part.

That commercial software is build normally to lock you in and lock out any possible evolution path, the learning curve is fixed: when you learnt a certain number of things "you are productive" and there is no more, no future.

On FOSS normally software offer many evolution paths, which means you have to learn few thing and you can start, using the software issue or desire arise and you learn new things in an ever grown knowledge that regularly pay off. Also standard terminology is normally used, for instance you never find FOSS project to invent terms like "BIA" (Cisco name for MAC address of a nic, "burn-in address") or "Enable mode", "write terminal" and things like that.

That is certainly true for some FOSS, but not for all. Many FOSS seems to not differ much from their non-FOSS equivalents, ex. LibreOffice, Firefox, Blender, Eclipse.

Accidentally all software you cite are born as commercial product: LibreOffice's origins are StartOffice, originally developed by StarWriter and after acquired by SUN; it became a FOSS project when SUN understand it can't profit anymore from it due to Microsoft Office popularity. Firefox was born as a commercial product (Netscape, originally an AOL product) that mimic Mosaic, but does not use it's free code. Blender was born as an internal product of NeoGeo, after distributed as a shareware by another company NaN and only after nan bankruptcy as a FOSS product. Eclipse born as a commercial IBM IDE, successors of VisualAge Micro Edition...

Of course, there are "recent" FOSS project with a design that take inspiration from commercial products, simply because that's the way authors think/know even if the code is free, but original FOSS software are another story.

maybe for LO and FF, but I don't think that you can present yourself as a proficient blender or eclipse user if you don't write your own plug-ins

In the context of emacs, you only ever need to learn terminology like

- major and minor modes,

- special, regular, mini and read-only buffers,

- frames,

- backup files,

- dired,

- mark and kill rings,

- hooks,

- the difference between C-x and M-x,

- mode line,

- registers

- and whatever else there is in emacs' configs, packages etc.

I dunno. Perhaps in emacs lingo "standard" means "no one uses these terms anymore"?

That's not a real problem, if you call it "advanced statusbar" instead if minibuffer, split instead of windows, contents instead of buffer it's only a matter of name. And most of them are pretty intuitive.

Consider a thing: commercial always say "start with us is quick", and they do their best for that. Unfortunately they omit an important fact: start it's quick, if you already came from commercial environment witch is the most common case right now, but all the rest is a pain. And we normally start once in our life, but we have the entire life to live...

"no one but few do something" for me is not a bad thing per se, consider how many dictatorship exists around the world or in witch conditions most human live around the Earth: do you prefer being in the center of Gaussian which means being a poor man fighting for some bad food just to keep up in some dictatorship or you prefer western welfare and the least bit of democracy we have?

> That's not a real problem, if you call it "advanced statusbar" instead if minibuffer, split instead of windows, contents instead of buffer it's only a matter of name. And most of them are pretty intuitive.

vs.

> Also standard terminology is normally used, for instance you never find FOSS project to invent terms like "BIA" (Cisco name for MAC address of a nic, "burn-in address") or "Enable mode", "write terminal" and things like that.

This is called hipocrisy.

There's nothing "intuitive" about emacs terminology.

> This is called hipocrisy. IMO it's simply a way to lock users in, like Cisco, like Oracle, like OpenBravo, like any other vendor try to do. Emacs simply was born many years ago, and kept going since that, why change terminology just to ease the newcomers make unhappy actual users?

> There's nothing "intuitive" about emacs terminology. And so what? Emacs is an OS not a small single-purpose apps, did you expect to being able to learn it an a day clicking around? In my personal experience, as a hardcore vimmer for more than a decade, as someone who have used different OSes (casually born on Irix thanks to a present by a family friend, evolved on FreeBSD, RH/Fedora/Debian/Gentoo, Solaris, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu/NixOS) I have seen anywhere "non intuitive" terminology, and I'm still there...

What about slices instead of partition? What about /dev/ notation in various unices? What about pfexec vs su vs sudo vs pkexec vs ...?

Chad Fowler's "professional services barrier" label https://books.google.ie/books?id=ig9QDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT48&lpg=PT... is a fair stab at explaining some of the difference. Which isn't to say that the distinction is really black and white, especially for non-programmers or people who don't have a lot of time to invest in a particular kind of tool.