[Klug-general] slightly off topic?

[George Prowse]

J D Freeman wrote:
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> On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 09:47:00PM +0100, George Prowse wrote:
>> Open is overrated in the FOSS community, sometimes no-cost is best
> 
> I am not so sure. It depends entirely how you define cost. There is more
> to it than the purely monetary sense and the purchase price.
> 
> Getting software for free, using it for a year, then finding you can't use
> it and thus can't get to your data is not great. 
> 
> If you have the source you can still access your data, ok you may not have
> the skills yourself to use the code, but there is no reason to not take it
> to your friendly local code monkey.
> 
> This is the whole point of four freedoms as outlined by RMS.
> 
> * Freedom to use for any purpose
> * Freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs
> * Freedom to share with your friends
> * Freedom to distribute your improvements.
> 
> There is nothing saying that free software shouldn't have a monatary
> purchase price. Infact I am happy to spend money on open source software.
> But not closed source.
> 
> This is all a wonderful indication of how crap the english language can be
> at times, 1 million words in the language, and yet we don't have two words
> to differentiate libre and gratis. 
> 
> J

Way to prove me right...

RMS is a fruitcake, everyone knows he lost it years ago. I agree with 
the philosophy that open source is best but this "freedom" crap is taken 
too far by him and people that follow his every waking word (yes debian 
users i'm talking to you). He needs to wake up to the reality that we're 
not in the 70's, we're not all MIT and we certainly dont want a church 
with him as the pope.

Free and closed is just as good as free and open and people shouldn't 
get on their high horse and be the judge and jury just because a person 
doesn't want every tom, dick and harry looking at his code. You want 
examples of it going too far? Mozilla and the "IceWeasel" situation that 
Debian created which was just embarrassing for everyone who uses linux. 
Another? RMS and his stance on Nvidia's binary driver.

At the end of the day if you want to closed-source it, fine by me. If 
you want to open it... great, even better!