Under the banner of "harmonization" which is a big part of how the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was argued for (and won). It would be foolish to look at this legislation as something that happens "over there", something we don't need to educate the public about here too.
As much as I'd like to commiserate, there simply isn't enough detail on what the problems are which makes it difficult for anyone to help. But Ballmer reveals more than is probably healthy for Microsoft here:
"The people who are making political decisions instead of business decisions, we're going to lose some," said Ballmer. "The people who are making business decisions based on where are the applications, what is the value, what is the lowest cost of ownership, we're not losing them.
"For us, anything that becomes a political issue, nobody wins them all on merit."
However, this is a compelling reason to stand on the side of free software for freedom, rather than low price (and this, again, is one reason why "free software" trumps "open source"). Low price may get people's attention, but sometimes unexpected expenses come up and what will keep people around (such as the Chinese government as mentioned in the article) in the long term is software freedom--being able to inspect, share, and modify the software. When you base your decision on software freedom, software proprietors simply can't compete no matter how much they mark down the cost of their software. They know that and that is where free software can win. Technical merit can be had with enough time and effort, and low price is a side effect of software freedom. But the freedom itself, by definition, is not something you can get from any proprietor. The free software community does themselves a disservice by not teaching people about software freedom.
Considering that the "free" in free software refers to specific freedoms and not price (as has been pointed out in this thread and virtually every other thread discussing software freedom), I don't understand how your post deserved to be moderated as "Insightful".
This also has a practical impact on what software is developed. For open source proponents, non-free software is merely suboptimal, so if there is a need that is met with a non-free program, open source proponents will probably not seek to replace that program with an "open source" equivalent. After all, the practical ends of the user are being met.
Free software proponents, on the other hand, are more likely to seek a replacement for that non-free program with a "free software" replacement because they see non-free programs as unethical. Free software proponents will reject the non-free software out of hand regardless of its function because of its inability to be shared and/or modified.
Also, the difference between the two movements exposes a built-in philosophical weakness of the open source movement that the free software movement doesn't have: if all you value is practical function (runs faster, costs less, is more stable, etc.) the open source movement will sometimes have no way to convince you to use an "open source" equivalent to a proprietary program. You'll either be directed to use the proprietary equivalent or have no reason to reject the proprietary program.
If, instead, you learn to value software freedom (as the free software movement advocates) you value something software proprietors can never offer. Therefore, the free software movement is never put in a position where they are compelled to advocate non-free software. They appreciate the need to meet practical ends, so they advocate either writing a free replacement yourself, hiring someone to write the free software for you, and/or finding a way to do without that functionality until a free replacement is obtained.
Thus, it is the free software movement's philosophy that is the real threat to software proprietors.
Free speech is not absolute. And not all freedoms are deemed equal (some conflict). As Brad Kuhn and RMS have pointed out in their talks, your freedom to drive your car on the sidewalk is not deemed as valuable as my freedom to walk down that sidewalk safely (sadly, I don't know of a transcript of Kuhn's talk about how he came to free software or else I would cite the exact language). So, in copylefted free software licenses (such as the GNU GPL), one is prohibited from placing restrictions on the freedoms the license grants to licensees. The FSF argues that it is necessary to place these restrictions on licensees in order to grant these freedoms for derivative works and thus grant more important freedoms to a wider audience.
You selling software is morally wrong, according to RMS.
And your support for this statement is where, exactly? You've provided the URL to an interview that doesn't seem to back up your assertion and then not clarified precisely what statement RMS made that backs up what you claim he said.
The closest thing I could find in that interview to backing up your statement is:
[Q:] Is it your belief that "high-paying organizations" (i.e. proprietary software vendors) should be banned?
[RMS:] I would not ban high salaries, but I think they should have a high tax bracket. As for making software proprietary, I really don't care whether it is legal as long as in practice it is rare enough to have no significant impact on society.
This does not support your statement and it looks like you don't really understand what RMS means when he refers to proprietary software. He is not against commercial software, he is against proprietary software.
The FSF has written an essay to clarify this point. I think it is one of their most underrated essays. This essay has been published by the FSF for years now and is also in RMS' book of selected essays "Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman". Please notice how different this essay is from what the Open Source Initiative says about the free software movement (in case you don't already know, the OSI reduces the free software movement, from which it sprang, to "ideological tub-thumping").
I wish you had produced this article rather than related it with what appears to be your failing memory. In addition to the other essays others have already pointed to, I direct your attention to the notes on the use of the term "intellectual property" or "IP". This term is bad, and Stallman misses no opportunity to say as much in his talks, because it conflates a lot of different areas of law (copyright, trademark, patent, just to name a few) and presents them as though they were one cohesive set of laws with a common ground. They are anything but that. The term also prejudices one's thinking to cut short the discussion on how these laws should be thought of--property is one possible way to think about them (not a particularly accurate way), not the only way.
If you understood Stallman's motivation and logic as well as you say you do, you would know this too. Your post is highly overrated and I hope it is moderated down.
For those of you who appreciate the irony of an FSF speaker being recorded in a proprietary format, I should tell you I have already asked both Eben Moglen and the JOLT Harvard folks to consider distributing their talks in free formats under licenses that allow at least verbatim distribution in any medium.
Prof. Moglen told me if the JOLT folks did not produce a free format copy of his talk, he would do so himself. The person I spoke with at Harvard said he would take the licensing issue to their board for review.
Do you have evidence to support your idea that forks actually cause these problems? It seems to me that forks are one of the benefits of computer software--many developers can simultaneously pursue their idea of what is good and the community can decide what they like. It takes time to narrow down the choices to something good but that's just a part of life. It also takes time for the non-technical user to communicate to the GUI developer that their help is inadequate and there needs to be auto-discovery for everything. I also think forks are not something one can prevent in the free software community, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I thought ESR's comments were quite apt and worthwhile. I'm a technical user with a diminishing patience for software that caters to technical users instead of applying the 80/20 rule (what do 80% of the people want to do with this program 80% of the time?). Sox, a CLI sound file manipulation program, is a great example of this point because it hides a great deal of flexibility behind a horrible interface (not horrible because it's CLI): Converting from one sound format to another is hard enough with sox, trimming away silent samples from the beginning and end of the file seems to be impossible. It took me a lot of time reading a remarkably poorly written manpage and a needlessly complex usage syntax to figure this out. I have no desire to rewrite sox, I would sooner hire someone to do that for me or use a different program than stop working on the project in which I might have otherwise used sox.
Software freedom. If we are encouraged to leave free software improvement every time something doesn't work well out of the box, we will have left software freedom and entered the world of dependency. It's also worth noting that when things fail to work well in a non-free system, users are rarely encouraged to leave that system for a free system.
MacOS X has an easier interface for a number of things, but your question doesn't actually help anyone in the free software community unless it comes with some specific advice on what the free system can do better that doesn't involve leaving the system for dependency.
Whether they "get it" depends on you--are you actually dropping these services or threatening to do so but never acting on the threat? Threats mean little when they're not carried out. If you don't follow through on your threatened cancellation, your provider learns that you are a complainer they can afford to dismiss; they don't need to change their behavior because you'll keep paying the bills.
Making one's own backups doesn't become useless, it becomes something to fight for. The question is how much are people who understand the technology and the social issues at hand willing to fight so that the public can legally make backup copies of information they have legally acquired? Will knowledgable people just talk on Slashdot and never organize others to help take the issue to the public?
I would rather see the Apache booth at COMDEX and SD than at FOSDEM. The earlier we can throw the yoke of 'Free Software' from our backs, the earlier Free Software will fulfill its mission.
Software freedom is not something that chains you or in any way enslaves you. It is, as the name says, something that gives you freedom--freedoms you don't get with the other software you named. Even by the metric of mere popularity, Apache has apparently done quite well without booths at COMDEX and the like (Apache is still the most popular web server in use). But Apache is one of the outliers--most free software is not as popular in its field as Apache is in its field. I think we are better served by conveying how non-free software (not "commercial" software) restricts your freedoms to share and modify. There is nothing to gain by conflating the two definitions of "free" (except, perhaps, to point out how other languages don't have the problem English does because other languages separate freedom and price by using two different words). We gain more when we talk about software freedom and insist upon it. Insisting on software freedom has gotten us very far in the past 20 years. You don't gain success in a movement by throwing away the principles that the movement stands for.
While you raise good points about what happens in the absence of competition, and that the crime happened before the first copy of the CD was purchased, I think the parent poster had a good point too. The parent poster should not be chided for observing that people could have rejected these CDs in the first place.
People need to be introduced to musicians that don't sign with RIAA-affiliated labels. The public needs to hear about independant distributors that treat the public like partners, not criminals. I host a public affairs show called "Digital Citizen" on community radio (WEFT 90.1 FM) every other Wednesday 8-10p and I talk about issues including copyright matters. If you're near Champaign, Illinois I invite you to tune in. I have interviewed musicians and distributors that work with the public to bring us good music. I also make sure that the talks and music I play on the show can all be recorded and shared verbatim (at the least). I have a huge library of music to draw from at WEFT, but almost all of it cannot be shared in the way I want my show to be shared, so I don't air any of that music on my show.
Just as these RIAA-affiliated corporations make a choice to screw the public, we can choose not to be taken. But it takes a great deal of education to get the ball rolling. It's not impossible, it just requires time and work.
jonman_d said "Sadly, the Centrino support will most likely be a proprietary driver, but it's better than nothing." and mytec concurs saying "I'll take proprietary drivers if it means I can use the hardware I like with the OS I love to get work done.". For them, the debate is appropriately framed under technical superiority.
For people committed to software freedom, releasing proprietary software is not a contribution to our community. I don't want to be treated as a market. I don't want to spend my money to become dependant on some supplier that can vanish and leave me with no way to make their hardware work with my chosen free software operating system. For me, dependency is not support. So, therefore, I will continue to choose to spend my money on products that allow me to enjoy technical advantages while retaining my software freedom.
One of the ways I make friends is by sharing software legally. They understand that I don't put them in a dilemma--do I help my friends by sharing software or do I obey the law and follow the license on this non-free program?--when I give them a copy of free software. So I won't disrespect the philosophy of those who advocate for software freedom by calling it impractical theory or associating free software with blind partisans (two definitions for "ideologue" and neither accusation is true). So I'll give GNU an equal share of the credit for the operating system and I'll take the time to look around and see how much software freedom is changing the debate on software issues. I hope you'll reconsider your choice of words next time you speak about free software.
Software freedom means more to me than price. I'm willing to pay for software freedom. MacOS X is not completely free software, but on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux, and other systems I can run software that I can share with my friends or modify as I see fit. Sharing software legally means a lot to me.
I understand that the features you want might not be in free software now, but that can change with effort. Non-free software, on the other hand, rarely becomes free software.
How would we know how much MacOS adds to the price of the hardware+MacOS package? I thought Apple stopped allowing compatibles (which might have given us an idea of how much comparable hardware could cost without necessarily coming with a copy of MacOS). I would figure the best cost estimate nowadays is to find out how much MacOS costs alone ($129) and subtract that from the price of the package one is considering.
I think it's all about delivering software freedom. Chasing software freedom has served our community very well in the past 20 years. I think it will continue to serve us well into the future. If people want a free software alternative to Microsoft Office, they can try OpenOffice.org. If people wanted to run Microsoft Office on a free software system, WINE could probably do the job today. But I don't see people asking for that. I think IBM's money is better spent enhancing OpenOffice.org rather than being a part of Microsoft's sales team and making their non-free software available to a slightly wider audience.
I don't think many people know about OpenOffice.org (or Abiword, GNUmeric, and a host of other free software programs), hence they don't run these programs. I also think that as Microsoft Office becomes harder to justify, more people will look to alternatives.
If people become used to running Microsoft Office on a free OS at work and follow suit at home, they have taken a step toward software freedom (which is genuinely worth celebrating) but not as big a step as they could have taken. Adding the features people need to a free software alternative will help them justify the move to freedom.
I think ciaran_o_riordan has the right take on this. When proprietary software is running (say, by emulation) there is little desire to pursue software freedom.
This is partially because of the ethics the open source movement teaches--practical ends are the goal, not software freedom. When an open source program won't do the job, that movement gives one no reason to reject proprietary alternatives. Ironically, that means the open source movement's philosophy can sometimes advocate for software that is not open source. Once the desire or need for a program is sated, very little interest exists to write an open source replacement.
The free software movement, by contrast, does not have this built-in problem in its philosophy. Non-free software is rejected because (as the name says) it doesn't have the freedoms of free software--put briefly, the freedoms to share and modify the software.
It's not surprising to me that IBM would champion this. The open source movement was started to speak to business desires and it's doing an excellent job of that, even if it means giving up software freedom to achieve that end. Open source software can be a genuine contribution to our community when its advocates work on free software. I'm grateful that many open source advocates do this (IBM, for example, has contributed work to the Linux kernal under the GPL). But this is not always the case.
I'm curious about FreeBSD (and the other BSDs too), but it has been a while since I've had the time to install and administrate a BSD-based system of my own (OpenBSD 3.0, which was a fine system).
One of the things I just don't have much interest in doing is figuring out which drivers I need and setting them up. Are BSD systems these days good at automatically picking the appropriate drivers?
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is intended for licensing computer software, not music. Music may very well require different freedoms that the GPL doesn't account for (like public performance).
I understand the point you're trying to make--since music licensing and the GPL rest on the same copyright regime (with comparable default powers and permissions), if we honor the GPL aren't we somehow duty bound to honor any other copyright license? I disagree with this assessment because it attempts to conflate the differences between the licenses, as if they all have same effect on society.
The GPL contributes to society in a way proprietary software licenses do not. The free software community grew up around the GPL and the GPL is the most widely used license within that community. Other free software licenses contribute to community too, but few secure the freedoms granted by the license as the GPL does.
It's hard to compare a software license and a music license, but one point sticks out to me--withholding people's ability to change and distribute copies of the music (or performances based on the music), is obviously not a contribution to society; such licensing should not be put in the same class as GPL-covered works.
I realize you were only kidding, but GNU has nothing to do with the open source movement. GNU was started over a decade before the open source movement began. The start of the GNU project marks the beginning of the free software movement. The free software movement and the open source movement are different movements within the same community and, ironically (emphasis mine):
"Open source advocates do contribute to our community, when they work on free software packages, but our community is older than that movement, and owes its existence to the idealism that movement rejects. It was built by the free software movement, so it is the free software community."
This quote was from an article RMS posted to the GCC mailing list.
Slashdot Mirror
Under the banner of "harmonization" which is a big part of how the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was argued for (and won). It would be foolish to look at this legislation as something that happens "over there", something we don't need to educate the public about here too.
As much as I'd like to commiserate, there simply isn't enough detail on what the problems are which makes it difficult for anyone to help. But Ballmer reveals more than is probably healthy for Microsoft here:
However, this is a compelling reason to stand on the side of free software for freedom, rather than low price (and this, again, is one reason why "free software" trumps "open source"). Low price may get people's attention, but sometimes unexpected expenses come up and what will keep people around (such as the Chinese government as mentioned in the article) in the long term is software freedom--being able to inspect, share, and modify the software. When you base your decision on software freedom, software proprietors simply can't compete no matter how much they mark down the cost of their software. They know that and that is where free software can win. Technical merit can be had with enough time and effort, and low price is a side effect of software freedom. But the freedom itself, by definition, is not something you can get from any proprietor. The free software community does themselves a disservice by not teaching people about software freedom.
Considering that the "free" in free software refers to specific freedoms and not price (as has been pointed out in this thread and virtually every other thread discussing software freedom), I don't understand how your post deserved to be moderated as "Insightful".
This also has a practical impact on what software is developed. For open source proponents, non-free software is merely suboptimal, so if there is a need that is met with a non-free program, open source proponents will probably not seek to replace that program with an "open source" equivalent. After all, the practical ends of the user are being met.
Free software proponents, on the other hand, are more likely to seek a replacement for that non-free program with a "free software" replacement because they see non-free programs as unethical. Free software proponents will reject the non-free software out of hand regardless of its function because of its inability to be shared and/or modified.
Also, the difference between the two movements exposes a built-in philosophical weakness of the open source movement that the free software movement doesn't have: if all you value is practical function (runs faster, costs less, is more stable, etc.) the open source movement will sometimes have no way to convince you to use an "open source" equivalent to a proprietary program. You'll either be directed to use the proprietary equivalent or have no reason to reject the proprietary program.
If, instead, you learn to value software freedom (as the free software movement advocates) you value something software proprietors can never offer. Therefore, the free software movement is never put in a position where they are compelled to advocate non-free software. They appreciate the need to meet practical ends, so they advocate either writing a free replacement yourself, hiring someone to write the free software for you, and/or finding a way to do without that functionality until a free replacement is obtained.
Thus, it is the free software movement's philosophy that is the real threat to software proprietors.
Free speech is not absolute. And not all freedoms are deemed equal (some conflict). As Brad Kuhn and RMS have pointed out in their talks, your freedom to drive your car on the sidewalk is not deemed as valuable as my freedom to walk down that sidewalk safely (sadly, I don't know of a transcript of Kuhn's talk about how he came to free software or else I would cite the exact language). So, in copylefted free software licenses (such as the GNU GPL), one is prohibited from placing restrictions on the freedoms the license grants to licensees. The FSF argues that it is necessary to place these restrictions on licensees in order to grant these freedoms for derivative works and thus grant more important freedoms to a wider audience.
Please provide an exact quote of the statement.
And your support for this statement is where, exactly? You've provided the URL to an interview that doesn't seem to back up your assertion and then not clarified precisely what statement RMS made that backs up what you claim he said.
The closest thing I could find in that interview to backing up your statement is:
This does not support your statement and it looks like you don't really understand what RMS means when he refers to proprietary software. He is not against commercial software, he is against proprietary software.
The FSF has written an essay to clarify this point. I think it is one of their most underrated essays. This essay has been published by the FSF for years now and is also in RMS' book of selected essays "Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman". Please notice how different this essay is from what the Open Source Initiative says about the free software movement (in case you don't already know, the OSI reduces the free software movement, from which it sprang, to "ideological tub-thumping").
I wish you had produced this article rather than related it with what appears to be your failing memory. In addition to the other essays others have already pointed to, I direct your attention to the notes on the use of the term "intellectual property" or "IP". This term is bad, and Stallman misses no opportunity to say as much in his talks, because it conflates a lot of different areas of law (copyright, trademark, patent, just to name a few) and presents them as though they were one cohesive set of laws with a common ground. They are anything but that. The term also prejudices one's thinking to cut short the discussion on how these laws should be thought of--property is one possible way to think about them (not a particularly accurate way), not the only way.
If you understood Stallman's motivation and logic as well as you say you do, you would know this too. Your post is highly overrated and I hope it is moderated down.
For those of you who appreciate the irony of an FSF speaker being recorded in a proprietary format, I should tell you I have already asked both Eben Moglen and the JOLT Harvard folks to consider distributing their talks in free formats under licenses that allow at least verbatim distribution in any medium.
Prof. Moglen told me if the JOLT folks did not produce a free format copy of his talk, he would do so himself. The person I spoke with at Harvard said he would take the licensing issue to their board for review.
Do you have evidence to support your idea that forks actually cause these problems? It seems to me that forks are one of the benefits of computer software--many developers can simultaneously pursue their idea of what is good and the community can decide what they like. It takes time to narrow down the choices to something good but that's just a part of life. It also takes time for the non-technical user to communicate to the GUI developer that their help is inadequate and there needs to be auto-discovery for everything. I also think forks are not something one can prevent in the free software community, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
I thought ESR's comments were quite apt and worthwhile. I'm a technical user with a diminishing patience for software that caters to technical users instead of applying the 80/20 rule (what do 80% of the people want to do with this program 80% of the time?). Sox, a CLI sound file manipulation program, is a great example of this point because it hides a great deal of flexibility behind a horrible interface (not horrible because it's CLI): Converting from one sound format to another is hard enough with sox, trimming away silent samples from the beginning and end of the file seems to be impossible. It took me a lot of time reading a remarkably poorly written manpage and a needlessly complex usage syntax to figure this out. I have no desire to rewrite sox, I would sooner hire someone to do that for me or use a different program than stop working on the project in which I might have otherwise used sox.
Software freedom. If we are encouraged to leave free software improvement every time something doesn't work well out of the box, we will have left software freedom and entered the world of dependency. It's also worth noting that when things fail to work well in a non-free system, users are rarely encouraged to leave that system for a free system.
MacOS X has an easier interface for a number of things, but your question doesn't actually help anyone in the free software community unless it comes with some specific advice on what the free system can do better that doesn't involve leaving the system for dependency.
Whether they "get it" depends on you--are you actually dropping these services or threatening to do so but never acting on the threat? Threats mean little when they're not carried out. If you don't follow through on your threatened cancellation, your provider learns that you are a complainer they can afford to dismiss; they don't need to change their behavior because you'll keep paying the bills.
Making one's own backups doesn't become useless, it becomes something to fight for. The question is how much are people who understand the technology and the social issues at hand willing to fight so that the public can legally make backup copies of information they have legally acquired? Will knowledgable people just talk on Slashdot and never organize others to help take the issue to the public?
Software freedom is not something that chains you or in any way enslaves you. It is, as the name says, something that gives you freedom--freedoms you don't get with the other software you named. Even by the metric of mere popularity, Apache has apparently done quite well without booths at COMDEX and the like (Apache is still the most popular web server in use). But Apache is one of the outliers--most free software is not as popular in its field as Apache is in its field. I think we are better served by conveying how non-free software (not "commercial" software) restricts your freedoms to share and modify. There is nothing to gain by conflating the two definitions of "free" (except, perhaps, to point out how other languages don't have the problem English does because other languages separate freedom and price by using two different words). We gain more when we talk about software freedom and insist upon it. Insisting on software freedom has gotten us very far in the past 20 years. You don't gain success in a movement by throwing away the principles that the movement stands for.
While you raise good points about what happens in the absence of competition, and that the crime happened before the first copy of the CD was purchased, I think the parent poster had a good point too. The parent poster should not be chided for observing that people could have rejected these CDs in the first place.
People need to be introduced to musicians that don't sign with RIAA-affiliated labels. The public needs to hear about independant distributors that treat the public like partners, not criminals. I host a public affairs show called "Digital Citizen" on community radio (WEFT 90.1 FM) every other Wednesday 8-10p and I talk about issues including copyright matters. If you're near Champaign, Illinois I invite you to tune in. I have interviewed musicians and distributors that work with the public to bring us good music. I also make sure that the talks and music I play on the show can all be recorded and shared verbatim (at the least). I have a huge library of music to draw from at WEFT, but almost all of it cannot be shared in the way I want my show to be shared, so I don't air any of that music on my show.
Just as these RIAA-affiliated corporations make a choice to screw the public, we can choose not to be taken. But it takes a great deal of education to get the ball rolling. It's not impossible, it just requires time and work.
jonman_d said "Sadly, the Centrino support will most likely be a proprietary driver, but it's better than nothing." and mytec concurs saying "I'll take proprietary drivers if it means I can use the hardware I like with the OS I love to get work done.". For them, the debate is appropriately framed under technical superiority.
For people committed to software freedom, releasing proprietary software is not a contribution to our community. I don't want to be treated as a market. I don't want to spend my money to become dependant on some supplier that can vanish and leave me with no way to make their hardware work with my chosen free software operating system. For me, dependency is not support. So, therefore, I will continue to choose to spend my money on products that allow me to enjoy technical advantages while retaining my software freedom.
One of the ways I make friends is by sharing software legally. They understand that I don't put them in a dilemma--do I help my friends by sharing software or do I obey the law and follow the license on this non-free program?--when I give them a copy of free software. So I won't disrespect the philosophy of those who advocate for software freedom by calling it impractical theory or associating free software with blind partisans (two definitions for "ideologue" and neither accusation is true). So I'll give GNU an equal share of the credit for the operating system and I'll take the time to look around and see how much software freedom is changing the debate on software issues. I hope you'll reconsider your choice of words next time you speak about free software.
Software freedom means more to me than price. I'm willing to pay for software freedom. MacOS X is not completely free software, but on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux, and other systems I can run software that I can share with my friends or modify as I see fit. Sharing software legally means a lot to me.
I understand that the features you want might not be in free software now, but that can change with effort. Non-free software, on the other hand, rarely becomes free software.
How would we know how much MacOS adds to the price of the hardware+MacOS package? I thought Apple stopped allowing compatibles (which might have given us an idea of how much comparable hardware could cost without necessarily coming with a copy of MacOS). I would figure the best cost estimate nowadays is to find out how much MacOS costs alone ($129) and subtract that from the price of the package one is considering.
I think it's all about delivering software freedom. Chasing software freedom has served our community very well in the past 20 years. I think it will continue to serve us well into the future. If people want a free software alternative to Microsoft Office, they can try OpenOffice.org. If people wanted to run Microsoft Office on a free software system, WINE could probably do the job today. But I don't see people asking for that. I think IBM's money is better spent enhancing OpenOffice.org rather than being a part of Microsoft's sales team and making their non-free software available to a slightly wider audience.
I don't think many people know about OpenOffice.org (or Abiword, GNUmeric, and a host of other free software programs), hence they don't run these programs. I also think that as Microsoft Office becomes harder to justify, more people will look to alternatives.
If people become used to running Microsoft Office on a free OS at work and follow suit at home, they have taken a step toward software freedom (which is genuinely worth celebrating) but not as big a step as they could have taken. Adding the features people need to a free software alternative will help them justify the move to freedom.
I think ciaran_o_riordan has the right take on this. When proprietary software is running (say, by emulation) there is little desire to pursue software freedom.
This is partially because of the ethics the open source movement teaches--practical ends are the goal, not software freedom. When an open source program won't do the job, that movement gives one no reason to reject proprietary alternatives. Ironically, that means the open source movement's philosophy can sometimes advocate for software that is not open source. Once the desire or need for a program is sated, very little interest exists to write an open source replacement.
The free software movement, by contrast, does not have this built-in problem in its philosophy. Non-free software is rejected because (as the name says) it doesn't have the freedoms of free software--put briefly, the freedoms to share and modify the software.
It's not surprising to me that IBM would champion this. The open source movement was started to speak to business desires and it's doing an excellent job of that, even if it means giving up software freedom to achieve that end. Open source software can be a genuine contribution to our community when its advocates work on free software. I'm grateful that many open source advocates do this (IBM, for example, has contributed work to the Linux kernal under the GPL). But this is not always the case.
I'm curious about FreeBSD (and the other BSDs too), but it has been a while since I've had the time to install and administrate a BSD-based system of my own (OpenBSD 3.0, which was a fine system).
One of the things I just don't have much interest in doing is figuring out which drivers I need and setting them up. Are BSD systems these days good at automatically picking the appropriate drivers?
Thanks.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is intended for licensing computer software, not music. Music may very well require different freedoms that the GPL doesn't account for (like public performance).
I understand the point you're trying to make--since music licensing and the GPL rest on the same copyright regime (with comparable default powers and permissions), if we honor the GPL aren't we somehow duty bound to honor any other copyright license? I disagree with this assessment because it attempts to conflate the differences between the licenses, as if they all have same effect on society.
The GPL contributes to society in a way proprietary software licenses do not. The free software community grew up around the GPL and the GPL is the most widely used license within that community. Other free software licenses contribute to community too, but few secure the freedoms granted by the license as the GPL does.
It's hard to compare a software license and a music license, but one point sticks out to me--withholding people's ability to change and distribute copies of the music (or performances based on the music), is obviously not a contribution to society; such licensing should not be put in the same class as GPL-covered works.
I realize you were only kidding, but GNU has nothing to do with the open source movement. GNU was started over a decade before the open source movement began. The start of the GNU project marks the beginning of the free software movement. The free software movement and the open source movement are different movements within the same community and, ironically (emphasis mine):
This quote was from an article RMS posted to the GCC mailing list.