On Friday 14 December 2007 21:49:23 Richard Stallman wrote: > When speaking privately to someone I know is not likely to install > non-free software, that is true. I can say to him, "You could use > OpenBSD, as long as you take care, if you use the ports system, to > check that the programs you install are free." > > When speaking to the public, that is not a real option; if I tried to > do that, it would get simplified in transmission down to "Use > OpenBSD", and that would lead people to use OpenBSD including the > ports system.
Remember what Linus said to the Gnome folks ? "If you think users are idiots, only idiots will use it". Well, that's pretty much the point. I do not intend to speak for OpenBSD as a whole, as I am merely a user of it, but I guess the OpenBSD developers just consider that it is up to the user to decide whether he/she thinks, for whichever reason, that installing non-free software is acceptable, or even if the difference matters at all to him/her, and that the fact that it _does_ matter to them (why else would the base system be 100% free ?) does not give them the right to impose that view on the user. You might say that some, maybe most, users of computer software are not aware of the differences between free and non-free software, and what they imply. That might be true. But I really don't think that making the mere fact of "telling people [non-free software] exists" unethical, to quote your words, would do much good to the cause of free software. Since you know French, you might have heard this sentence by Victor Hugo + Construisez une icole, et vous ditruirez une prison ;, "build a school, and you'll destroy a prison". Education is the key. If OpenBSD, or Debian, or Ubuntu, or any other OS forbade the user to run his/her favourite piece of software "because it is non-free" without he/she understanding what this "free" stuff is all about, he/she would just think "those Linux/BSD/GNU/whatever people are just over-zealous elitists, and I'm going back to Windows". The time when everyone will be aware of the issues related to software freedom has not come yet, so you and I and everyone attached to it should do his best to reach that goal. That's what you do, not without talent, in your essays and speeches, and that, to me, is a great thing. On the other hand, speaking evil about another, free, operating system just because it provides ways for the user to conveniently install non-free software if he/she wishes to do so is not. Firas -- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments GnuPG public key: http://itsuki.fkraiem.org/gpgkey [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc ]
