Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
Shachar Shemesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:It seems to me that you are bringing ideoligy into the discussion, even as you are claiming to reject the notion. Why is it bad that you cannot rip your bought CD and pick and choose tracks for your car? You are not, as you claim, working without an ideoligy. You are just drawing the line somewhere else.
All of the above technologies and laws are bad on technicalWhy? they are bad if I use anything that is deems illegal or
reasons. That much is true. However, if your view of them is purely
technical, you will notice that they are only bad for you IF YOU ARE
USING OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. If you are not (such as most law makers),
they don't seem to be so bad.
unauthorized, depending on the context. It has nothing at all to do
with Open Software (except that maybe part of the motivation of the
initiators of these legistations was to make OSS less usable).
Hamakor was founded to give all of these opinions a voice. I can see myself assiging money from the society's resources to sponsoring a talk by Ira about why the four freedoms Stallman defined are important and everyone should be getting them, just as I can see myself assiging those same funds to a talk by you as to why Linux is a great and inviting platform for commercial companies to base their proprietary products on. I don't see any contradition here, as I am only doing what I was elected to do as a board member of Hamakor - giving a stage for the opinions and forces that pushed and are pushing free/open source software forward.
Now, if you, as you claimed, "do not want to be a part of any organization that pushes forward ideoligy, even if I agree with it", then I am very sorry to say that you will probably not want to be a member of "Hamakor". As saddening as it is to me, on a personal level, I cannot change the society's goals because of that.
That last statement gets more emphesis by the fact that there is no organization, and defenitely no society, that are not powered by ideoligy. Even when you say you want Hamakor to promote open source software based on technical merits - that's ideoligy. The thing that makes it so is the fact that you don't stop believing it just because people prove you wrong. Linux does not have SMP support as good as SCO, hspell is no competition to Word's Hebrew speller.
The problem is even more acute when products such as OpenOffice are discussed. These products are developed purely according to the commercial development model. OpenOffice can offer just two advantages over StarOffice:
1. 1. It is cheaper.
2. If Sun goes down, change license, want to charge more or
discontinue the product altogether, you are not left out in the rain.
I think we all agree 1 is a technicality, and noone is honestly trying to use that as the major selling point. 2 is a 100% Stallmanistic argument. There is nothing technological about it. I can claim practical reasons for going for 2 as a choosing factors (cheaper support, no threat of extortion, etc.), these are all just the reasons ANY free software is preferable over non-free software.
Shachar
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