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On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 11:50 +0000, Kevin Tunison wrote: > > Politics... good ol' politics. As long as people do their homework > like these guys at Humboldt, there is nothing to moan over really. > The most difficult thing I find in promoting open-source is that of > removing this preconception that I will always choose OS 'just > because'. Not true. Merely making a business case for free software is not the objective because that route does not ensure freedom. We need to *reinforce* the conviction that people who promote free software *should* require free software just because it is free software. No other reason is necessary or even desirable. Open Source is not the objective, freedom is the goal and freedom is the basis upon which all software should be judged. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html Yes, it is political - so what? Bring it on. I don't see why free software should apologise for existing or make excuses for why it is better than proprietary code merely because it is free software. It is free software, therefore it is better than any proprietary equivalent. QED. Why? Simple - because I can share free software with my friend. That is what matters to me. Unless I can share the source code with my friend to improve the code, then the binary is useless to me. No software can be "fit for purpose" unless I can share it because sharing *is* the purpose for which I want to use software. I want software to get better at what it can do and in order to achieve that, I must be able to share the code with my friend and work with my friend to improve the code. *Sharing is the whole point*. Fit for purpose is a red herring - free software is not warrantied to be fit for purpose, it says so in the licence: # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. Sharing is more important - sharing is what matters. > If it's fit for purpose, and does the best job (based on what you > list as a value/requirement - very easily said though), then there > shouldn't be any question either way. This is what Microsoft still don't quite understand - it is not enough to adopt "the open source development model" or "put the source code somewhere public and have an OSI licence". Software deserves to be shared - equally and without penalty. Yes, it can be good to write a whole new free software replacement for a "fit for purpose" proprietary binary but a lot of that work has now been done. What remains are the niche markets where it is difficult to find enough free software developers with suitable knowledge or experience to develop a whole new replacement. What we need to promote, in these situations, is that "fit for purpose but proprietary" software is completely unacceptable because we value freedom, with or without a free software replacement. Proprietary software is unfit for purpose by definition - because the purpose is to be shared. Why should it be illegal for me to improve a piece of software that I am required to use every day of my working life? Why is it acceptable that I cannot share the "fit for purpose but proprietary" code with anyone else, I cannot even describe the bugs or possible fixes, I cannot discuss the layout, the design, the restraints, lack of scalability, the idiocy of the decisions already made during development and testing? I have the knowledge and the skill to fix the problems that blight my working day but a "fit for purpose" approach makes it illegal for me to even publicise the specific problem, let alone fix it. That is WRONG. I do *not* have the time to develop an entire replacement from scratch and there are very few people who would - there is more than enough to do with the free software we already have. What is needed is pressure on these proprietary software developers to deliver free software solutions. This comes not from an attack on their business model but from giving them an understanding that proprietary code is simply the wrong choice - wrong for reasons of freedom, not business. Sadly, I'm still seeing too many free software proponents looking to develop a whole new platform, a whole new technology instead of dealing with the remaining proprietary targets. It happens because new is cool and breaking proprietary monopolies is very hard. That doesn't mean we should support yet-another-reinvented-wheel. We don't need yet another language, yet another www model, yet another paradigm, yet another email client that does the same as a dozen others. We don't need every CPAN module in every distribution, we need the best of CPAN - the bits that actually make a difference to the freedom of the users. Sometimes this is by providing replacement tools for proprietary code, sometimes this is by making it easier to turn proprietary code into free software. What I feel free software needs is more solutions using the existing software. More ways to get existing free software onto more machines. More flexibility, more scalability, less code, smaller packages - more granularity in the current range of free software. It's a problem that is becoming more apparent within Debian - quantity is not the objective any more, quality is what matters now within free software. Quality that encompasses the best of what freedom provides - the support for modification to suit specialised situations whilst retaining the ability to update the modified version from the "mainstream" version. Stop thinking of free software as Debian vs Ubuntu and RH vs Fedora. Break it down into smaller lumps and consider how to get GNU/Linux onto more machines, more easily, with more flexibility and more bits that "work out of the box". That is what I'm doing - what are you doing about it? We have more than enough of most applications to do the job. We mostly have enough developers to do the job. We have too many new approaches and what we lack is usable solutions that "JustWork(tm)". There is shed-loads of money to be made in collating and deploying these solutions. There are plenty of companies that will support you during the work too. It's low-hanging fruit - the current crop of free software provides a basic construction set where you have all the bits, all the eye candy, all the support - what is needed is the glue and the effort. Developing and maintaining the solution for those who have the money to pay for maintenance contracts but don't have the expertise to do the work - that is where the money is to be made. It's not a lot more than bolting together existing components in a new way, I'm sure most of us did that with one childhood toy or another. Whether the toy used metal or plastic, the idea is to make money from doing the same now with your keyboard. Fit for purpose is insufficient. A business case approach is insufficient. The evidence is all around us that free software can earn money - what matters is that all software should be free software. Once that is done, everything else falls into place. All that matters is that I must be able to share the code with my friends to improve it. Open Source does not ensure that I can share the code and improve it - the software needs to be free software. Software is a form of speech, not an item of property. Software does not have "owners", merely authors and everyone deserves the right to share software with their friends and colleagues. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html "As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying “No” to proprietary software. You deserve to be able to cooperate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks. You deserve free software." -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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