[Klug-general] slightly off topic?

Karl Lattimer karl at qdh.org.uk
Sun May 10 08:43:03 UTC 2009


> 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.

Well said "Fruitcake" classic, but remember Eric Raymond has lots of
guns in the trunk of his car, so don't leave him out!

Freetardism thankfully is generally speaking dwindling. This is mostly
thanks to Canonical and Ubuntu, shipping binary drivers, firmwares and
wot not so instead of having a debate on some LUG list about the merits
of downloading firmware from a company that refuses to release source
code, instead we can watch DVB-T, use our Wi-Fi and get decent 3D
acceleration.

The only reason that user uptake of linux has increased is because these
out dated ethical notions are NO LONGER RELEVANT!

Same as all religion, people with sense move on, shrug and get things
working, rather than praying to some random kernel hacker to solve all
their problems.

The benefits of open source are great, freedom to change, improve,
understand, learn, I'm 100% behind that philosophy but it is just that,
a philosophy, it is not a moral compass!

I hate to bring it up, but you all should make sure that you ACTUALLY
read Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists (Rather than taking the
sketchy, aggressive reading from Revolution OS as the definitive).

If I take for example wine-doors, over the last few years I've put into
that project thousands of man hours, I've paid for hosting, domain
registration and more out of my own pocket. So far, the monetary cost of
wine-doors is approaching £3,000 over 3 years. The cost of man hours
well, I couldn't even calculate it.

Essentially I can't afford to keep doing this.

Now I'm taking donations, and thankfully because of some generous people
I've managed to pay my bandwidth bill and re-enabled the repos for going
live tomorrow. 

Open Source only works because people get paid for it, I get paid to
write open source code that's why it continues... Altruism always comes
to an end, it's all well and good for the USERS of open source software,
the NON-CONTRIBUTING USERS, I'd add. People who take take take from free
software and never give anything back... People like that who preach the
merits of open source without putting back are no better than Christians
that don't practise forgiveness...

BR,
 K
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