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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Hardware for GNU Experimentation


From: Quiliro Ordóñez
Subject: Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Hardware for GNU Experimentation
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 15:40:00 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120430 Thunderbird/12.0.1

El 08/05/12 17:34, Jason Self escribió:
Joel Kahn<jj2kk4@yahoo.com>  wrote ..
If I can
demonstrate to her an absolutely Libre environment that consistently runs
more swiftly and reliably
But what if it's not? Free software can be technically better to proprietary
software but that's not always the case. Shouldn't the discussion be based on
her using free software because it respects her freedom, and not because it's
technically better in some way?

True. Joel: The software could be technically better or worse. Being free is the main issue. Especially for a teacher such as your wife, the right to learn is very important. Free software is the only means to learn about software. For that objective, testing the software is a mere errand. I am sure that testing it with a live distro such as Trisquel http://trisquel.info would suffice because there is no need to install. It will run from a CD without installing anything on the hard disk. There are other free distros at gnu.org/distros

I'm reminded of http://aws.bluehome.net/better.oga

Great audio. Here's my transcription.-


Question: What you typically hear is that, unfortunately in order to keep the public free, engineers will now have to implement their own version of an existing application.

RMS: Yes but so what?

Question: We'll also have to pick a much harder design.

RMS: Yes we wil. And that's just life. It's too bad. The point is that an argument of that kind can't refute what I just said. I can't affect the validity of what I said. And I could be wrong perhaps or you could disagree. But what I said can't be made wrong by arguments of that kind.

Question: I just wanted us to think about it because in the past freedom has been a way for us to get the best software that we could get.

RMS: Well, I never thought of it that way. I thought of it as good luck, good fortune that some GNU programs turned out to be better than the proprietary [libre] versions. When I started this, I didn't think that was going to happen. I didn't say I wanted to replace Unix because I could do it so much better. I've never even used Unix so I had no idea if it was good or bad. It didn't matter anyway. It was proprietary [libre] which mean it was evil. So ethically speaking it was as bad as software could get. So I knew that ethically speaking I could make something that was better. Whether it would be tecnically better, I didn't know. Maybe it would be technically almost as good; which would have been enough. But instead it came out technically better too. Well. I'm not going to complain. When I'm writting something I try to do a good job. Often I did and sometimes I didn't. And I suppose it's the same for you who are GNU contributors. But that is not the primary issue. The primary reason not to use proprietary [libre] software isn't that we can write something technically better. It's because proprietary [libre] software subjugates you.

--
Saludos libres,

Quiliro Ordóñez
(593)2-253 5534
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