On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Seth Cohn wrote:
>
> The desire for free and the desire for free-dom often overlap. Not always
> but often.
> I will pay for software rarely. It must be something I feel is worth it,
> and something I cannot find a free equivalent for. Those 2 are a rare
> combo.
>
Well one of the longer and more thought out talkbacks mentioned an unix
CAD program, and the community as a whole certainly hasn't been shy about
using proprietary gaming software.
I can see more than just two sides to this issue. One of which is that if
we're serious about world domination then we want to at least have the
capability to use some proprietary software in a safe and sane manner.
Another being that we do want to encourage the growth of a commercial
market for open source software AND proprietary software that runs on free
as in speech Operating Systems. For the latter aspect there a couple of
very interesting models that come to mind,
a. an open source engine, or framework with proprietary artwork/artificial
intelligence; i've seen a few things like pygame and some of the other
gaming projects (like id software) releasing the underlying engine as open
source but allowing apps to be built on top of that engine that are
proprietary. I could see openoffice moving in this direction, which would
benefit both the writers and users of the software.
b. The open source feature subscription model, where you see an open
source projects core contributors accepting payments to add desired
features which are released as either open (good) or proprietary (not so
good)
> Seth
>
> translation of above into SethSpeak(tm) :
>
> If I can't apt-get, I don't (usually) apt-want it.
> There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but I do pretty good at finding
> them.
> Users are Lusers. got root?
>
Ah yeah, (oh grow up :-)
