2008/1/21, Ringo Kamens 2600denver@gmail.com:
I don't think it's an issue of strategy or stages. Purely speaking, if we sacrifice our ideals then we will accomplish our goals faster. For instance, it would take much less effort for somebody who wants an anarchist or socialist revolution to go in and kill every important member of government. The problem is that they are sacrificing their values. If somebody really wants equality, respect, etc. then they can't go around doing violent acts. What happens after the government collapses? The masses haven't learned from the past and the new government will be just as bad as the previous one. If a revolution is caused by mass participation, the end result lasts longer and is better. This is the same with free software. If you say that closed source software is exploitive, if you say that it is wrong, then don't use it. Period. I say capitalism is wrong yet I buy some things. It's an issue of survival, but that same argument can't really be applied to your choice of software. Comrade Ringo Kamens
Excellent points Ringo. Thanks for sharing this.
You can look at a glimpse of how we did it in Kerala what result we got here http://www.fsdaily.com/Beginner/Teachers_becoming_Free_Software_advocates_as...
Teachers are now advocates of Free Software, they are ready for sacrifices for Freedom because they are taught to value Freedom over convenience. The case in point is about printer drivers, many of the commonly used printers (for example canon ip1000) does not have a Free driver but one teacher responded to it like this,
"Of course there is some problems in Printer Driver but it can be solved in the new versions"
If we want Freedom and software that works at the same time, you can't reach there by starting at non-free software. But if you insist on freedom you will get it. See what happened with java and flash for example. We said gratis is not enough, we need libre and now we have those. Instead if we wer content with non-free but gratis java and flash we would not have the Free tools now. Same can be said about the graphics drivers. When companies like Dell start offering Intel graphics card because they work out of the box with Free Software NVIDIA and ATI will feel the heat and would follow. ATI already released their specs for some graphics cards.
Cheers Praveen