>From: Rui Miguel Silva Seabra >Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 10:03 AM >To: misc@openbsd.org >Subject: Re: Real men don't attack straw men > >On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 08:19:38PM +0530, Mayuresh Kathe wrote: >> Nobody out here is going to listen to what you're going to say, and >> you are going to go on and on about how you were justified in labeling >> OpenBSD as not compliant with your interpretation of the word "free", >> which we don't give a farthing for. > >He only doesn't want to *recommend* OpenBSD because of the ports tree >distributing some (however few exceptions those are) proprietary software. > >He's not labelling OpenBSD non-free, just non-free-friendly because some >non-free are distributed in the ports site. > >Now, you may disagree with his non-recommendation, but you're >misinterperting what's being said completely, and perhaps giving a worse >judgement of his words than what he "did" (depending on the point of view). > >Rui > >(ps: if someone wants to answer back with insults just shove it, ok? I'm >a fan of the Free Software operating system called OpenBSD and it's >policy on pro-active security) >
And yet, you still don't have it quite right. Saying that the ports system distributes software is not correct. The ports system only distributes some make files and a few patches (all free). These make files contain links to where to download said "evil" software and make them easy to install... should the user choose to. It does not actually distribute the software. I for one think it is much more free to be allowed to choose for myself if I want to stick with free software (99.9% of the time) or "go the low road" (usually only if the free choice isn't useable for a particular situation) and use non-free (non-free friendly) software and I am very thankful to the devs at OpenBSD for not only allowing that choice, but making it easy to do so. Freedom is about choice. No matter how you stack it, limiting choice limits freedom. The whole political BS of GPL vs BSD etc boils down to this. OpenBSD does not limit choice. I can do with it what I want. If I could figure out how to run IE on OpenBSD (legally) and I could talk one of the ports devs to add it to the ports tree (legally) IE would become one more choice of web browser to use with OpenBSD and no matter what kind of religious/political issues anyone else has about it, in my book that would be a good thing because it would give yet another choice. Would I use it? NOPE! Would I make fun of anyone I saw using it? YUP! But, in a perverse way, it would make OpenBSD even more free, because some nut job out there would have the freedom to choose to run IE on OpenBSD if he wanted to. So I ask you: How does that limit freedom? s
