To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.
Today the number of people who are not computer users is dwindling all the time, as technology seeps around the globe. It takes knowledge to make this technology work. People who hoard this knowledge, punishing and threatening others who try to obtain and share it, are not doing so in order to preserve it, despite what they may claim.
Instead, they are preserving power for themselves at the expense of others' freedom.
We can click our freedoms away by signaling OK in the Microsoft or Macintosh window after squinting through their thirty pages of restrictions, or we can click CANCEL, and see instead if there is a piece of free software that does what we need.
We should click CANCEL when we can because that's the more ethical choice. This means we'll have to learn a new program, and sometimes the free program might not work as well.
If we want free drivers for hardware, we need to be prepared to not buy the hardware in the first place, because as long as nVidia and the like can get away with distributing proprietary drivers, they will.
The theory that somehow, magically, eventually nVidia will concede on this and Ubuntu and others can then replace everyone's proprietary drivers, retroactively with free software is an illusion.
Proprietary software companies and distributions are now working hand in hand to seduce users and lock them into particular vendors.
Did you hear about the one laptop per child project? They're distributing new computers to people all over the world, and for many people, these will be the first computers they use.
Guess what runs on them? GNU.
ASUS are selling low-cost laptops, you can get them at the same price with a 12G or 20G SSD - the higher capacity one? Runs GNU.
In many areas of the world, GNU is standard in schools, in education, in servers and increasingly in consumer devices.
To me, this is a great example of the free software vs open source debate.
Free software is a political movement, concerned with user freedom, and the creation of an operating system made entirely from free software.
Open source is a development methodology that aims to make better free software, but has no problem with using and even developing proprietary software at the same time.
Personally, I think is a real shame that so many distributions have non-free software in their repositories, but they are ultimately more concerned with getting more users to their distro than promoting software freedom.
It's quite telling that the GNU project only lists a handful of distributions, most of which very few will have heard of or used, yet I'm glad that such a list exists.
The distributions which are making inroads to getting on that list, such as Fedora and Debian, and the distributions which move further away from that list with each release, including, sadly, Ubuntu are quite evident of the difference in their communities.
Ubuntu is concerned by things like "marketshare" -- there is no market when your product can be redistributed freely.
Who said you should lose your job? I don't know what your application does, but if someone seeing the source code is going to cause you to lose your job, that's a pretty bad situation to be in.
Why would it be different if people had to pay to see it?
Free Software is never about price, and always about freedom. Specifically, the freedom to run, modify, study and distribute software. Lots of people sell free software, and make money doing so -- earning money is a useful thing, but it should never be more important than freedom. If Apple can find a way to make money from iPhones whilst remaining free, that would be a good thing.
One such way for Apple to do that would be to sell iPhones. Which they're already doing.
Re:Brian Reid - time bomb in Scribe
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 1
IIRC, Scribe was under a license akin to something like a BSD license today, but when he no longer had time to maintain it, sold it and forced users who wanted to continue using it, to agree to some fairly obnoxious license, which included the time bomb.
Excuse me for not having much sympathy for him getting fired.
Brian Reid - time bomb in Scribe
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.
"Those who do not wish to use proprietary software (Flash, MP3) to hear this conference over the Internet are also invited to use this call-in number. It will be active approximately 10 minutes before the live podcast begins."
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I personally like 3d acceleration and a working wifi card.
Me too. I have an Intel card and a wireless card using the ath5k driver which is now free software and part of Linux.
Having these things does not mean you cannot do it with freedom.
To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting our rights to learn and to share what we learn with others.
Today the number of people who are not computer users is dwindling all the time, as technology seeps around the globe. It takes knowledge to make this technology work. People who hoard this knowledge, punishing and threatening others who try to obtain and share it, are not doing so in order to preserve it, despite what they may claim.
Instead, they are preserving power for themselves at the expense of others' freedom.
We can click our freedoms away by signaling OK in the Microsoft or Macintosh window after squinting through their thirty pages of restrictions, or we can click CANCEL, and see instead if there is a piece of free software that does what we need.
We should click CANCEL when we can because that's the more ethical choice. This means we'll have to learn a new program, and sometimes the free program might not work as well.
The ethical choice is not always the easy choice.
To talk of the 'freedom' to install proprietary software is like talking about the 'freedom' to voluntarily enter into slavery. It is absurd.
There will always be people who will install proprietary software on their GNU systems, but distributions really have no need to distribute it!
Ubuntu for example, is even shilling for the likes of Opera on its own website.
If we want free drivers for hardware, we need to be prepared to not buy the hardware in the first place, because as long as nVidia and the like can get away with distributing proprietary drivers, they will.
The theory that somehow, magically, eventually nVidia will concede on this and Ubuntu and others can then replace everyone's proprietary drivers, retroactively with free software is an illusion.
Proprietary software companies and distributions are now working hand in hand to seduce users and lock them into particular vendors.
Ubuntu recently stopped work on Gobuntu, it's free distribution, and instead is making this an option in the Ubuntu installer... sadly, this should BE Ubuntu, not an option in the installer that most people will miss.
Actually, I'd disagree with that.
Did you hear about the one laptop per child project? They're distributing new computers to people all over the world, and for many people, these will be the first computers they use.
Guess what runs on them? GNU.
ASUS are selling low-cost laptops, you can get them at the same price with a 12G or 20G SSD - the higher capacity one? Runs GNU.
In many areas of the world, GNU is standard in schools, in education, in servers and increasingly in consumer devices.
To say GNU has failed would be ridiculous.
To me, this is a great example of the free software vs open source debate.
Free software is a political movement, concerned with user freedom, and the creation of an operating system made entirely from free software.
Open source is a development methodology that aims to make better free software, but has no problem with using and even developing proprietary software at the same time.
Personally, I think is a real shame that so many distributions have non-free software in their repositories, but they are ultimately more concerned with getting more users to their distro than promoting software freedom.
It's quite telling that the GNU project only lists a handful of distributions, most of which very few will have heard of or used, yet I'm glad that such a list exists.
The distributions which are making inroads to getting on that list, such as Fedora and Debian, and the distributions which move further away from that list with each release, including, sadly, Ubuntu are quite evident of the difference in their communities.
Ubuntu is concerned by things like "marketshare" -- there is no market when your product can be redistributed freely.
Passport.com ftw.
Never had a hotmail.
Who said you should lose your job? I don't know what your application does, but if someone seeing the source code is going to cause you to lose your job, that's a pretty bad situation to be in.
Why would it be different if people had to pay to see it?
Charge what you like. Nobody's saying otherwise :)
You don't even have to give it back to the community.
You just give/make available a copy to whoever you're distributing it to (ie. the customer paying you to change it)
CPC users of the world unite!
Go for it... the Commode was a piece of trash, and everyone knows the CPC was the best ;)
Speccy was okay once Sugar got his claws into it and marketed the bastard properly though.
Why do you read email viruses? Seems like a pretty silly thing to be doing.
If Microsoft GPL'd Microsoft Office, would you install it?
No.
Um, Macs "just work"?
I refer you to http://www.macfixit.com/
* QuickTime distortion in early 2008 MacBooks; Mac OS X 10.5.3 to fix
* Custom icons in the Dock disappearing
* QuickTime 7.4.5: app launching problems: try reinstallation
* Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update 1.0 (#3): caps lock problems;
* Office 2004 11.4.1 can accidentally delete Excel
* Long passwords can cause iWeb publishing errors
Yeah. That's just a few from their homepage.
Macs don't "just work" anymore than anything else. They're computers. They break, and software is written by humans, who make mistakes.
Free Software is never about price, and always about freedom. Specifically, the freedom to run, modify, study and distribute software. Lots of people sell free software, and make money doing so -- earning money is a useful thing, but it should never be more important than freedom. If Apple can find a way to make money from iPhones whilst remaining free, that would be a good thing.
One such way for Apple to do that would be to sell iPhones. Which they're already doing.
Please take a look at our ideas list and let us know (summer-of-code@gnu.org) if you have any questions.
I suspect he'll run on it.
+1
No, he means like GNU or BSD.
IIRC, Scribe was under a license akin to something like a BSD license today, but when he no longer had time to maintain it, sold it and forced users who wanted to continue using it, to agree to some fairly obnoxious license, which included the time bomb.
Excuse me for not having much sympathy for him getting fired.
Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.
<sarcasm>What a guy!</sarcasm>
Redmond wouldn't touch a GPL Opera browser.
And Konq is GPL, so I'm not sure what your point about it is?
Sure. Give me the source code for Opera under a free software license and I'll use it. Until then, no thanks.
"Those who do not wish to use proprietary software (Flash, MP3) to hear this conference over the Internet are also invited to use this call-in number. It will be active approximately 10 minutes before the live podcast begins."