On 20111120@23:12, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote: > 2011/11/20 Joris Meys <jorism...@gmail.com>: > > I am very much pro open source and I have my own ideological ideas > > about a lot of things. > > I am personally not so much in favour of open source. Open source is > ok, but it's not enough. Free (vrije) is a lot more important than > open. > > > And as much as I'm pro open source, rigorously trying to block any > > access to paid software is not only hypocrite > > No, there's nothing wrong with paid software. Paid software is great. > Non-free software is not. There's a difference. There is lots of good > free commercial software, e.g. Red Hat, Ubuntu, gitorious: > > http://www.ubuntu.com/business > http://gitorious.com/ > > even selling binaries is great for free software, e.g.: > > http://ardour.org/download > > The possibility of also selling binaries for Octave has come up > several times, and I am much in favour of this. > > > (there is an octave binary for both Windows and Mac, although you > > can't accuse either of them of being philantropic when it comes to > > sofwarte). > > The reason why it's important to have Windows and Mac binaries is that > there are users of those non-free OSes who would otherwise have no > access to Octave. It is not an endorsement of Windows or Mac OS X, > just like having a mex-file interface in Octave is not an endorsement > of Matlab. It's the only way to give those users a taste of free > software they would otherwise not have. It's much too difficult for a > user of a non-free OS to completely switch the OS just for one program > like Octave. But little by little, by making free software available > to those users, they can slowly work on a transition towards free > software. > > > It is just ignoring the facts stated. People use tools if they're > > useful, not because the ideology that's behind them. > > The point of GNU software isn't to make popular software. The point is > to give people access to free software. If it happens to be GNU, > great, if it happens to be other popular free software, also great. So > the principles behind free software are more important then the > popularity of any particular bit of software. > > I personally don't care as much if people are using Octave as long as > they're able to do free scientific computation and care about free > collaboration. If people think Scipy or Scilab works for them better > than Octave, great. Those also allow free collaboration, free work, > free science. > > The problem I try to fix when working on Octave is to give people a > free scientific environment unfettered by license agreements or secret > algorithms. I work on Octave because I think it has its own merits and > because nothing else aims to freely ran Matlab code, at least not to > extent Octave does. There is much free Matlab code out there. It > shouldn't be locked to Matlab. The point of Octave compatibility with > Matlb is to break vendor lock-in, and that's why I think our work on > Octave is important. > > I don't want to tell those people to go and use non-free software by > hosting links to non-free software on Octave-Forge. That would work > against the entire reason I enjoy working on Octave. > > Yours forever free, > - Jordi G. H. > .. I agree completely with what Jordi wrote here, so I quote it entirely. I also appreciate the way he motivated these reasons here and in other emails.
My (as a newcomer) contributions to Octave-forge/free software are motivated by all these reasons.
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