From: "Tiago Hori" <tiago.h...@gmail.com> > I despise the argument that some places are lawless and therefore you need > encryption and DRM. Those places you are probably thinking of > are the one more in need of free culture. Poor third world countries.
Yep. The problem is that there are more people living in those countries than on rich countries. Not everyone lives in USA. :-) And the culture cannot be changed by a few software developers that try to earn for living. > I believe however that as professor and in an area that would never have been > where is at without free software I can help by letting people k ow > that for every commericial bioinformatics tool out there, there is a better > open source. This is not true. Open Office and Libre Office are not better than MS Office. The best OCR programs are commercial. The best programs which are used to improve the accessibility for the blind are also commercial. From the accessibility point of view, which is the most important point for that category of people, MS Windows is the best OS because it has the best accessibility. And there may be many other examples... > As for the challenge of making a living out of it and saying that there is no > other choice, I feel bad if that is true Yes there is another choice. To do something else than programming. In some countries the programmers create open source programs and sell books, training or other additional services. In other countries the books are scanned and OCRed and read for free, or downloaded from torrents, and very few people pay for training, so these are not a choice. > Maybe the only solution is in educating the next generations. Yes. That is the solution. But it is also a solution for the next generations of programmers, not for the current one. But from what I see, the world actually goes in the opposite direction. However, I think ignoring the fact that things like perl and Linux are what they are because of community not individual and therefore should be treated as so, a product of the community, is wrong. I agree. This is why I said that the recommendation is to also create open source, as a contribution to the community. But this doesn't mean that the users of an open source language should never write proprietary applications. Octavian -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
