Justin Ryan [PHT] writes:
> freedom, but free beer beats non-free beer. You cannot have freedom in
> every sense of the word, everywhere. someone has to pay the rent.
"Not being able to pay the rent" doesn't logically follow from
"software should be about freedom." This is a common fallacy by
people, even those who think "freedom is nice, but I'll take the free
beer too." ESR, whom you seem to think you know a lot about, makes
this point nicely in his most recent paper.
> companies who make money off of free software don't, they make money off
> of something else and contribute to free software.. photodex is the same..
> they give away free beer and dish out a little freedom to go along with
> it.. give them a chance.
Now, I don't know much about this specific case of photodex, but I'm
not clear on where this freedom is that they're dishing out. I
thought it was all 'free beer.'
> the main point of sale for photodex is it will help bring windows and mac
> users to linux.. windows and mac users are perfectly happy with free
> software (beer) and won't care about free software (freedom) for quite
> some time. I love the free software concept, I also use lots of
Like someone else on this list says, are these the kinds of users we
really want? I'm sure some people feel that way, and I respect
differences of opinion, but I don't feel that way. The ideal new
Linux user is one who came to the platform because of the freedom
aspect (like me), not the low price aspect or even the stability
aspect. Not that people who are looking for a bargain in an OS are
rotten to the core, they are just not "my kind of people."
> two for it. They're out to make money, but not to screw the Free Software
> community in the process.
I'll agree that they're not trying to intentionally harm our community
(for all I know.) Their indirect effects are probably, on the whole,
not so bad either. Each new piece of software ported brings important
visibility to the platform as a whole, and its concept of freedom.
On the other hand, I think that companies that are "out to make money"
*only* by selling bundles of bits are eventually going to go the way
of the dinosaurs, as well they should. I know this is an unorthodox
view, but I am willing to defend it. It should be clear that I am
*NOT* advocating forcing this set of beliefs on anyone else. Nor are
rms or the FSF. If you want to sell your proprietary bundle of bits,
there will usually be some suckers to buy in to that whole concept and
I'm not going to stop either of you. (Don't expect me to stand
silently, however.) That whole arena seems to be more about marketing
tactics than software engineering. Is it about solving real-life
problems with computers or putting arbitrary price tags on
inexaustible bundles of bits?
Even if they give the bundles of bits away for no money, it's still
just a black box that I am unable to modify or improve, even only for
my own use. I'm not a GPL fanatic. I don't think it's the answer to
all of life's problems. I think an acceptable license would be one
that gave me complete source code, but didn't allow me to copy it to
anyone else. Perhaps patches could be traded with other licensed
(paid) users. No, I don't look at 100% of the source code of every
GNU utility on my system. I look at some of them (and tweak a smaller
subset of that.) But it's very comforting to know it's there. If I
upgrade my C library, I can recompile everything else, and not depend
on a vendor releasing a new version when they feel good and ready.
Closed-source applications are not 100% evil all the time, especially
for little utilities like whatever this photodex thing is. Where it
becomes evil is in proprietary operating systems, and most especially,
so-called "Office" or document preparation software. One company
controls the standard 100%, and due to network externality effects and
the desirability of "standardizing", is able to maintain a virtually
unbreakable monopoly. I see Free Software (as in freedom) as the
main, perhaps only, bulwark against this particularly insidious
effect. How many times have you been sent a MS Word document and been
unable to read it? Without paying hundreds of dollars for a duly
licensed version of Word, which will of course be released for Linux
when pigs fly.
I'm all for making money. I want to be rich too. If I get rich
through my programming abilities, so much the better. However, I also
feel it is my duty to inform people that an alternative to proprietary
software exists. It is up to them to make the choice to use it or
not. It's not purely altruistic either; the more users of GNU there
are, the more developers there are, and the more likely bugs are to
get fixed.
Back to photodex; I don't think this particular software announcement
was the end of the world, or an evil conspiracy to rob GNU users of
their freedom. It's just like christ said, this particular
announcement was more suited for Freshmeat. I recently released a
GPL'ed program (Pagecast; check Freshmeat if interested) and you
didn't see me posting here about it. Erm, except for this little
blurb here.
I can understand how some of the previous posters in this thread could
get annoyed by this. I wasn't personally, but now that it has
progressed this far, I felt the need to respond.
> fact that people actually have to make money off of software once in a
> while, and he knows how free and commercial software can co-exist. We
Again, no one *has* to make money off of software. No one's holding a
gun to your head. If everyone voluntarily decided they wanted
software Freedom and nothing else, would there be mass starvation in
Austin and Silicon Valley? I don't think so. Since you seem to be
such a big fan of ESR, you're probably familiar with his observation
that 90% of all software is "in-house" stuff written to do a job and
not to be sold to the outside world. This software would continue to
exist and programmers would be hired to maintain it and produce more.
It's that remaining 10% that I worry about sometimes. Most of that
10% I could care less about -- dinky little utilities. It's the
important stuff like oh, say, operating systems, TCP/IP stacks, and
document preparation where Freedom is vital. All of these types of
software "want" to standardize on a single, broadly compatible
specification for interoperability. If a single corporation (which
has duty to its stockholders, not the public good) controls these
standards, they can claim that they "giving customers what they want"
on one hand, while nakedly fleecing them on the other. Would you
rather have the standards that drive the Internet controlled by solely
by Microsoft, or open to all the people of the world?
I'm not a Communist in any sense of the word. What I describe just
above sounds much more like Communisim (Stalinism) that anything RMS
has dreamed of. To me, open source / libre software represents the
ultimate in Capitalism. All players are on a level playing field and
must compete fiercely in all arenas. It's software Darwinism, not
Five Year Plans handed down from the Microsoft Central Committe.
And finally getting back to the original thread; I'm not trying to
compare this non-free software announcement on siglinux to the
imminent resurgence of world Stalinism. I'm just trying to make the
point that most people blindly accept non-free software without
thinking of the broader issues. And I'm no holy saint either; while
all the software I use on a daily basis is Free (mainly Linux, X,
Gnome, and Emacs [praise be]), I can think of at least one non-free
program on my hard drive; Quake II.
Justin, you made some decent points in your post. I hope you'll
consider the other side as well.
peace.
---Preston
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