Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 12:36:13 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <20000523123612.A24821@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <20000522234412.A11711@sharmas.dhs.org>; from adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org on Mon, May 22, 2000 at 11:44:12PM -0700 References: <20000521131809.A6546@sharmas.dhs.org> <20000522170335.B94994@azazel.zer0.org> <20000523085510.A5994@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000522222438.A11092@sharmas.dhs.org> <20000523114956.A39397@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000522234412.A11711@sharmas.dhs.org>
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> > The only programming market which would conceivably suffer a bit is > > that of prepackaged, mass-produced, bloated, overpriced junk like MS > > Windows and MS Office. Frankly, I have no problem with that scenario. > > If you talk to the man on the street, he'll tell you how MS outlook, > inspite of Melissa and ILOVEYOU does a great job of getting work done. First, I think it depends on which man on the street you pick. I know several who wouldn't say so -- they're just stuck with Outlook because their firm standardised on it. Second, are you suggesting that the world is a better place because of Outlook and its non-standard "extensions", even if you ignore the viruses? I think very few people would agree with you, on either side of the BSD/GPL fence; but because of the viruses, I find more and more "ordinary" people are taking a dislike to Microsoft's attitudes. Companies spent days just deleting emails and cleaning up their systems recently. It's the ordinary employee who suffers from it, not the management. > My personal view - free software is an act of philanthropy, tool for > education, hobby for personal satisfaction and an ego booster for > those who're good at it. And my personal view: it produces better software, whether BSD or GPL, and it gives you some control over the system -- which means both the ability to break it and the ability to fix it when it breaks. This view comes from actually using the stuff, not from philosophising about it. My absolute favourite single "application" program has to be TeX, and in second place is probably the Gimp. I'd even sacrifice some performance for control. I prefer BSD or linux to Digital Unix (which also we have here) not for performance reasons (its performance and stability are excellent) but because when there is a problem with it you're stuck. You're afraid even to experiment for fear of screwing up the license managers and stuff like that. For instance they wanted to charge some large amount for a Y2K fix, so we just decided to live without the fix -- the problems seem pretty minor. R. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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