[Klug-general] slightly off topic?

Fish goldfish654 at gmail.com
Sat May 9 22:03:50 UTC 2009


2009/5/9 Karl Lattimer <karl at qdh.org.uk>:
> peter, you really did have the wrong idea about free as in beer, you
> explained free as in freedom...

Sorry if that came off as a bit snarky, but it's true.  You were
describing Free as in Freedom.

Personally I think that people can sometimes overrate free as in
freedom software.  It does have its advantages, but a well written and
*well documented* piece of free as in no cost application can
definitely do just as well in a lot of circumstances.  Equally a badly
documented free-as-in-freedom piece of software is often a worse
solution than a free-as-in-no-cost one.  Saying "the source code is
the documentation" is all well and good, but not eveyone wants to
decipher your C/JavaScript/PHP/Haskell/Python code just to work out
how to achieve some task.



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