[Sussex] Distros

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Paul Tansom <paul at aptanet.com> writes:

> You had me worried there for a moment. I saw details on it yesterday
> iirc and none of them were dated, most had discussions relating to
> installing, compiling or porting so April fool didn't even cross my
> mind. I've checked back though just in case - the Slashdot article was
> dated 31st March as well, although I rarely actually read Slashdot
> having got a little bored with the number of articles that simply point
> to other sites or are largely insignificant and accompanied by long
> ranting comments below. I get more than enough news from other sources
> now :)

I hear that ! :-)

> So the FSF is more interested in the corporate/business user than the
> home user? Games are probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks to
> many home users migrating across, these and things like genealogy
> software (not software to put data into, but the databases of
> information that are Windows based or use Excel spreadsheets with
> macros) and gardening software. You can argue that these have not real
> social value depending on your definition, but without addressing them
> in some form (either free versions or encouraging commercial versions on
> a free OS) you will be leaving a large section of potential users behind
> - perhaps they are the last likely to move across, but do dismiss a key
> 'application' that is used by a significant group of computer users
> seems a little short sighted.

No.  The free software foundation cares about all users, but we
rightly see that third world users get a lot more benefit from having
business, scientific and educational software they can use and
maintain freely than you or I get from having the ability to maintain
Grand Theft Auto.

Yes we would love these things to be free, and yes we see the value of
those things as a way of attracting new users to free software.  The
FSF does not have infinite resources, so some things are less
important to us.

> I must stop playing devils advocate, I can feel the horns poking through
> my hair now ;)

And there was I think it was just pointy hair :-P

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org

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