I take it from these three notes that you're not sold on the Freedom part of "Free Software".
On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 17:01, Brent Thomson wrote: > 1. Convince hardware manufacturers to do the drivers themselves. NVidia > does a great job of this already. Put pressure on other device > (internals and peripherals) makers to do the same. I've actually had > more problems with Windows XP not having drivers for my peripherals than > Redhat (recent releases), but a slick setup process is still lacking. Proprietary drivers are a /bad/ thing. Aside from the fact that vendors tend to do things their own way and break everything it fosters the falsehood that the interface specs for their devices are valuable intellectual property which must be hidden. What needs to happen is the opening of those interface specs so that the kernel and X hackers can get the drivers written properly. If the vendors want to pitch in some of their own resources to help that's even better, but the drivers need to be open source. > 4. Coax the big-time software manufacturers to develop native apps for > Linux. I read that Macromedia may start doing this soon, but it would be > great to have Photoshop for Linux. This is okay, but there's a better way (for us): The GIMP needs more help so it can become as good as Photoshop and better. We need good SVG support in Mozilla and Konqueror so that we don't need flash anymore and we can focus on making good SVG studios. > 5. Put some resources into projects that interoperate with the rest of > the world like OpenOffice. Better support for MS formats (.doc, .xls, > etc.) will help speed adoption. Also nice would be better NTFS support. > (The Captive package seems to work pretty well. Maybe it's not in the > main distros cuz it still needs work?) Better support for proprietary formats is good, but you've completely missed the boat on captive NTFS: The reason no one uses it is that you can't unless you own a license to windows, and even then it probably falls way outside the rights given to you in the MS-EULA. Better NTFS support is coming. The 2.6 kernel is already mostly there. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
