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Software Livre, Anyone?

Posted by timothy on from the one-lump-or-emilio-umeoka dept.

tbray writes "They just had this huge OSS conference in Brazil. One good write-up by Simon Phipps is here. And hey, down there, OSS and Java play nice together."

2 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. kudos to Brazilian Goverment !! by Garabito · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Finally, 3rd world countries are getting it!

    Free / Open Source software is the way to go.

    You can't make your country a developed one by importing overrated and overprized propietary technology.

    By the way, the brazilian goverment is also doing a good job negotiating FTAA (ALCA), not like most other countries in Latin America, which are desesperatly yielding to "free trade" agreements with the US, which only benefit big bussines and make more restrictive IP regulation, like the DMCA, software patents and extensive pharma patents for their countries.

  2. Re:Missing the point by lasindi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Actually, you are missing the point of free software. It's not to provide gratis software, it's to provide free-as-in-freedom software. Richard Stallman has always tried to make the distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom, and you seem to want to break it down. People have every right to charge for their software, and deserve to be paid if their software is good. If no one bought free software, the free software movement would be unsustainable. Programming is fun, but money provides another incentive to write even better programs.

    Also, you say that rights to modify programs can be bought from any company, but you can't find software that costs nothing. Let's take a look at a company almost everyone hates: Micro$oft. They certainly provide some free-as-in-beer software to the public, especially when it bolsters their monopoly. An example is the Visual C++ compiler. What I've never heard of is someone buying the source code to, say, Windows.

    Allowing people to get the software for free is one of the many reasons free software can compete with proprietary programs, but that's only a byproduct of the real purpose: to let people actually buy software and do with it as they please, not just a license to use it in the way the author envisioned.

    --
    I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.