It's only Debian that caved into Stallman's desire to rename Linux for his own glory. Like most Free Software advocates, Stallman asks that the operating system is called by its technically correct name, GNU (or rather GNU/Linux for the added benefit of general familiarity with the Linux trademark). This is not for RMS' own glory (after all he didn't call it Stallmanix), but to lead the curious to the GNU philosophy instead of websites promoting "Linux" for its technical superiority. It is a matter of association; the GNU project was initiated to ensure anyone could use a computer without resorting to proprietary software, while the Linux kernel was made for fun and experimentation and just happened to fill the remaining major gap in an otherwise complete operating system by the name of GNU.
Insisting people use the name GNU/Linux is what best serves Stallmans cause; promoting the idea that Free Software is benefitial to society, whereas proprietary software is not.
A lot of books on GNU/Linux acknowledge that GNU is the technically correct name for the operating system, but that they choose to use the more known term "Linux" to avoid confusion. I'm all for avoiding confusion, but believe this is a simplification that only makes things more confusing for the uninitiated. While "what is GNU?" is easy to answer, "what is Linux?" will bring a multitude of more or less contradicting answers because the term is being used so generally.
Why should we? How do we benefit from this? There are three types of public benefits with regard to creative works: 1) to have as many as possible original works created and published; 2) to have as many as possible derivative works created and published, and; 3) to have no or as few as possible (and for as short a time) restrictions on the public with regard to those works. How about 4) to have as many GOOD works, original or derivative, created and published...? If the economic incentive for musicians hadn't been conforming to the mainstream and thereby appealing to the music companies, but rather to find their own audience, on their own, chances are music generally would be a lot better. In such a scenario DRM would only prevent the music from being heard and thus the artist from being discovered by potential fans.
There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.
My recommended line of design tools are:
GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?) Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required) Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout) Quanta (For making the actual webpages) Scribus (For making professional PDF's)
Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.
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Have you tried http://eclassical.com/ ?
They offer only mp3's, but at least they're DRM free.
Sorry, I mistakenly modded you down instead of up, so I though I'd reply to make my mod go away...
Insisting people use the name GNU/Linux is what best serves Stallmans cause; promoting the idea that Free Software is benefitial to society, whereas proprietary software is not.
A lot of books on GNU/Linux acknowledge that GNU is the technically correct name for the operating system, but that they choose to use the more known term "Linux" to avoid confusion. I'm all for avoiding confusion, but believe this is a simplification that only makes things more confusing for the uninitiated. While "what is GNU?" is easy to answer, "what is Linux?" will bring a multitude of more or less contradicting answers because the term is being used so generally.
If the economic incentive for musicians hadn't been conforming to the mainstream and thereby appealing to the music companies, but rather to find their own audience, on their own, chances are music generally would be a lot better. In such a scenario DRM would only prevent the music from being heard and thus the artist from being discovered by potential fans.
There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.
My recommended line of design tools are:
GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)
Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.