Hi Friends,
This is my first mail to the community and be rest assured i am going to push this thing thru for a long time to come. In this first mail, i am keeping the topic of discussion very very generic.
LETS INTROSPECT AND WATCH COMPETETION ...
Is it mere incedental that when we talk of competition to FSF like revolution, name of Microsoft cant be avoided (we may like it or not).
To give my friends an insight into microsoft future corp , i would really recommend you folks to take a look at this :
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/projects/
Now lets look at where we stand ...
http://www.gnu.org/projects/projects.html
We are no doubts as good as the folks at microsoft ... But we carry VERY GOOD HABITS of Naming our projects in greek and latin. and more so complicating the description of software even more. Just to add another example, look at the names of the utilities that come bundled with Red Hat/SuSe/GNU Linux versions etc. They are really good at scaring away a common user. (I have asked a lot of end users this question, and be sure they all agree).
DO YOU THINK WE (INTELLIGENT TECHIES) CAN REACH MASSES THIS WAY ? DO THE MASSES NEED "FREE SOFTWARE" OR "FREE GOOD AND EASY TO USE SOFTWARE" ...
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DO YOU THINK WE (INTELLIGENT TECHIES) CAN REACH MASSES THIS WAY ? DO THE MASSES NEED "FREE SOFTWARE" OR "FREE GOOD AND EASY TO USE SOFTWARE" ...
your question is like, "Do the masses need a hut where they live happily or do they need the latest technology laser enabled cage where they get electrocuted?"
We in the Free Software world donot care if our existing software cannot do everything that proprietary guys do. Agreed, there may be a good number of bleeding edge stuff coming out from the proprietary world. All the bleeding edge becomes _their_ property. and its not something you can enhance. Infact there have been a lot of such "bleeding edge" stuff that donot let us even use it for any purpose. I have heard ppl from research labs like the ISRO say that they had to reinvent the wheel many a times just because an available proprietary software does not let them use it for space research. As a programmer, Proprietary software is _definitely_ not the best thing you can have. You can't modify it to fit your purpose (atleast without paying a hefty sum to the owner of the software). It is only something that you can keep "praising". do you really want to do nothing in your life better than praising something that does not give you the freedom?
We are here to build a better place. Information needs to be free and that will _not_ happen when its in the hands of people who talk about 'intellectual property'. Software will be useful in all the possible ways only when its free. And thats where we in the Free Software world give more powerful software to the masses than what the proprietary guys do.
Join hands, if at all you wanted to, we can write _good_ software. You see, the word "good" has two meanings. :)
-Suraj
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Suraj Kumar -
Tarun Gaur