On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 02:53:46PM +0800, Sacha Chua wrote: > The beauty of open source is that we can choose how to waste our > time. ;) For example, I spend my free time maintaining a personal > information manager[1] written in an obscure programming language[2] > for an environment[3] that scares the heck out of most people. >
Shouldn't the guys at FSF make a guide to Emacs, or something like that? I'm attracted to it, but I still use vim for most things, including writing mail and src... I know there's a lot of howtos/guides for emacs in the net, (and hell, even short college courses ;-) but I believe the FSF should go a little lower down so even the average FOSS user (if there's such a thing ;) can even comprehend. Yes, I'm aware of a certain elitism among FSF/rms groupies (here be trolls) as well as those who advocate FOSS to be as easy (and insecure) as Win*; but if there's any freedom to be attained, to be cherished, there should be sharing of knowledge that's even comprehendable (is there such a word?) for the large masses of me-who-use-my-pc-as-a-glorified-typewriters... > People hack what they want to hack. If you feel some areas are > getting neglected, hack on them or find ways to promote them so > that they get more mindshare. =) > Open source (as per opensource.org) use to be like that. Simple. Unadulterated. Unfortunately, the prevalence of proprietary software (opened up by heartless orgs calling themselves businesses who prey on unsuspecting hackers to get them sign their NDAs and force people to conform to EULAs) have (and will always) spoil the mix. Everything used to be simple mindshare, as simple as going to the next-door neighbour and borrow a screwdriver and hammer (gee, who does _that_ nowadays). Now, we have Linux, we have GNOME and KDE, we have Windows and Mac OS X, we have a whole bunch of OSes and their accompanying tools/apps/warez, all implementing things that have been done before in the sixties at the MIT AI labs, with little or no innovation at all. We have many technologies, competing technologies that subtly drain away our most precious natural resource (and we thought that was Iraqi oil ;-)... I think that was what rms was pointing to when he left the AI lab: as we effectively bartered our freedom in exchange for temporal conveniences, we effectively paved the way towards consumerism, alcoholism, babarism, masochism, etc... It goes all the way... Geez, and we all thought EULAs were harmless... (also, I almost forgot to mention: at post-911, nobody shares screwdrivers to anyone anymore...) Cheers, Zakame -- |=-------------ZAK B. ELEP (Registered Linux User #327585)-------------=| || Web: http://zakame.spunge.org GPG ID: 0xFA53851D || || http://zakame.homelinux.org ICQ UIN: 33236644 || || Location: Daet, Camarines Norte Running Linux 2.6 || |=----------1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D----------=| Debian - When you've got better things to do than to fix a borken system
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
-- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
