Tryggvi Björgvinsson wrote: > > IIRC, Stallman used proprietary UNIX in the beginning in order to be > able to work on GNU and then switch as soon as he had a working > operating system. In that my opinion is that one should be able to > use proprietary software when free alternatives aren't available.
Please don't use this as an excuse; it is nowhere near to the situation we have now. RMS (and others) used Unix as a foundation in order to develop GNU by writing components, one by one. It was the only way. To put it in other words, those early freedom fighters used prison's tools to provide an escape from the prison for all of us. Now that we have entirely free operating system we are lucky that we're not forced to use unethical software. Of course, many features are not available, and that will be the case for some years to come. For example, a few years ago there were no free audio/video streaming programs so instead of using proprietary software that facilitated that job, we just didn't use such software, we used to say "Those things can only be done with non-free software, so that's not an option". Today, we have the same situation with Flash and proprietary drivers (and other stuff, of course). We just reject to use them, this is the only way. Using the nVidious drivers or Adobe's Flash plugin won't lead to freedom, quite on the contrary, so people who justify using non-free software either don't value their freedom or just use it as an excuse to keep their conscience clear (or both). _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
