Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
I think principles are important, even if it means being an implied "evangelist." Thank you for not saying "zealot," at least. I don't care if my principles aren't "embedded in reality." It doesn't matter how many people can "fully enjoy" the freedoms in free software. I don't need to be able to modify the software to enjoy the freedom to use it as I wish, or to share it with others.
Whether you work on your car or your washing machine is irrelevant to software freedom, except in the cases where unfree software prevents you. It certainly means nothing to my preference for free software over freeware, does it?
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My washing machine and car examples were about whether or not it is apathetic to not care about how something works. I was trying to demonstrate that when I say most users don't care about these factors in software, I am not trying to be derogatory of them. (You appeared to mistake some of my earlier comments in this regard.)
There are lots of different freedoms involved in software (and I am still talking about software - no politics, and no religion - I promise. ... At least, no more than perhaps the sort of religious fervour that sometimes comes into such discussions
).
The sort of free software you have been alluding to generally follows the so called "
copyleft" principle (any changes you make to it must be made available under the same conditions). While I think this principle was probably necessary for open source grow to a force in its own right, the very lack of freedom that this principle imposed constrained the growth of open source for some time.
Whether people like it or not, the software industry is heavily dependent on corporate support, and copyleft doesn't fit easily into most corporate requirements. Eventually someone came up with the bright idea of dual licensing, and this opened up the way for the source code of many more projects to see the light of day. That is: Freedom is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.
What rules you use to choose the software you want to use is, of course, entirely up to you. But if you are not a software developer then my opinion is there is not much advantage in choosing strictly free-as-in-speech software. Most free-as-in-beer software has as much freedom as most users need or want. Indeed, a lot of free-as-in-beer software these days will have been developed using - at least partly - the same source as a lot of free-as-in-speech software, but under alternate licensing. The same precautions in software selection are required by users in any case.
None of which is trying to argue that free-as-in-speech software is a bad thing. I think its rise has been very good thing for the industry, and this is a very good thing for all users: so much more to choose from, and much of it very much higher quality than it would have been otherwise. I just think it's a mistake to see it as the only way to get good software.