On Wed, 2010-06-09 at 17:39 +0100, Alan Pope wrote: > You should get out more. I meet people every day who couldn't care > less whether software is GNU GPL 2, LGPL, AGPL or whatever. The vast > majority of people I meet want software that works. That's it. If it's > free of cost that's a bonus.
Alan, I know you've been burned by the FSF and by other people who bang on about Free Software. I can't help how badly other people have communicated to you, but your not helping improve that so long as your position is that you revel in principle having a culture that is ignorant of software ownership and the social and political fall out. I sometimes think that there is a set of people who have been scared by bad FSF communication and have taken it upon themselves to valiantly oppose all idealism as useless. Refusing to talk about noble ideals isn't noble, refusing to consider the future isn't clairvoyant. > Case in point just today, Case in point, I have those all the time. > a co-worker and I were comparing e-book > readers. I have an Amazon Kindle (which the FSF childishly calls a > 'swindle' [1]) and my colleague has a Sony e-reader. I mentioned some > of the features that the kindle has which the Sony device doesn't, > namely over the air newspaper delivery. However I also pointed out > that there's this great software called 'calibre' (which is free/open > source) which lets you 'scrape' news content from websites and upload > to your reader (whatever make/model). As soon as I mentioned Calibre > she said 'yeah, that's the one I use!'. I showed her the news-scraping > feature and she was delighted. I'm not saying you should throw away your gadgets, just consider the cost of it. If the cost is acceptable then fair enough, but you won't even talk about the cost as if it didn't exist. How unfair of you to disempower people by holding back what you know. > At the end of the conversation I mentioned to her that I have donated > to the author because it's great software. She immediately told me > she's already donated too. At no point in the conversation did we talk > about software freedom, licenses, code sharing or the commons. She > wanted software that works, and she was prepared to _voluntarily_ pay > for it if it did! That's nice but economics is not this issue although it's helpful if we have good economics for industrial revolution, I'm sure donations will help, but do they pay the bills? > I don't feel the need to bang on about software freedom to her. She's > already there, she uses Ubuntu (of her own choice, not advocated by > me) at home, and free software on Windows machines. She does that > without really caring what the license implications are. Great, don't bang on, it shouldn't be an absolute force of nature, not some big stick to beat people with, it's a consideration, a note in a calculation. Your apparently as absolutely apposed to mentioning it as the FSF is absolutely apposed to using proprietary software. There needs to be more nuance and less blank and white thinking. > I would be willing to assert that there are a massive number of people > out there just like her, and rail-roading them into being free > software advocates isn't productive. What is productive is that she > took Ubuntu CDs off my desk and used them to spread Ubuntu to her > family because she liked the software and it works. They don't care because we don't speak up, rail roading has hurt you obviously and that's why it's not effective or right to communicate like that. Forgive the socially awkward people, they tried and failed to explain things in a way that isn't absolute and grandiose. Social and political implications go hand in hand with technical function, you can't separate one from the other just because you don't feel like thinking. What a world we have made for ourselves out of such a culture. Martin, -- loco-contacts mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/loco-contacts
