Stallman's dream and GPLv3

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Do you feel that people need to be reminded or are you convincing yourself?

I have no problem with FSF; I even work with it building embedded systems and I used it to build my own firewall over a MS server. The point that seems to be lost among the evangelists such as Stallman and yourself is that the success of Linux over other embedded system offerings has been the accessibility of open source to business at a much lower cost. Stallman, who has been working in his academic environment doesn't understand that. The spin that he and others are trying to place on open source is going to make closed source OS's a more viable choice once again. VxWorks is pretty good, it?s just expensive. Most businesses are only interested in open source because of the bottom line, none of the companies that I have worked for have been concerned about the ?lets all have a group hug? mentality that you and the FSF seem to have and none of them have contributed back in the community in labor or bug fixes that we ourselves made to the source code, only in the fees that they pay to the creator of the distro that they use. Reading these comments on ZDNet I see the same mentality to be common among the Linux user base, they are only concerned about free as in free beer, most of these people are only concerned about DRM because it would prevent them from stealing music and video. Yes, for those of you reading this and want free beer when you make a copy of your commercial CD and DVD?s and share it on line or with your friends it is stealing. This is your user base Jeremy, the majority is only concerned about spending as little money as possible and a majority of the people that have been sipping the kool-aide such as Stallman and yourself are actually a minority among FSF users.

As far as success on the desktop is concerned, for Linux that is just a pipe dream while the quality of available distros is so poor the availability of decent commercial quality software is so small and I don?t have see that changing anytime soon. The ?you have the source code so fix it yourself? mentality among the people maintaining FSF offerings is one of the largest hurdles to FSF acceptance in the home. My 70 y/o father is lucky that he can use email and some geek expects him to fix his OS or surf the net for updated drivers and patches when FSF software crashes? Lets get serious! I use Windows on the desktop but as far as making a dent in the Microsoft empire is concerned my money is that only Apple is going to make any progress worth mention. Apple ?gets it?, FSF does not.

Posted by: balsover   Posted on: 08/09/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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