Dear Mr Gaur,

Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Free Beer.

Dear Rishi,

"WE" here stands for FSF evanglists who value FREEDOM as much as you do. I really wonder whether FREEDOM again means not trying to write good software. What you call FREEDOM for yourself is the hard work of countless Open Source guys towards a common goal - promoting Free software.

Not really, FREEDOM arose from the GNU conception of Free software, not the OSI conception of free software.

Of course free software is doing a LOT. Apache, et al are doing a marvellous job at the cost of fragmentation, which is the holy grail of Software Configuration Management (which I learnt in Semester 7).

In any case, the end-user as you said does not _care_ whether software is Free. (but whether it is free matters to them a lot.) In that case, wouldnt it better to make Free software, than merely free software ?

The usefulness, flexibility, usability etc of software is a totally seperate consideration from whether software is Free or not. The former is measured by the way the artifact operates (ie, engineering values and metrics), and latter considers the means of distribution, utilization and improvement (ie, social values and social perception of the process of engineering)

So you mean to say that if the software come for FREE I should not expect it to be good. What a foundation "WE" (FSF evangalists) are laying down for others to follow.

I still wonder whether you are arguing on the side of Free or free software.

Let me remind you I am not talking about "you", the IT guy. I am talking about the end user for whom computers is a tool to do his work. And trust me he values "RICH USER EXPERIECE" more than getting a free software. IS THIS WHAT YOU CALL FREEDOM?

FREEDOM for who? You or the MASSES? I repeat lets move from "PHILOSOPHICAL MINORITY" to "MASS MAJORITY" and for masses your so called "SHALLOW" user experience matters.

Windows market share is a testimony to this SHALLOW concept.

windows market share is due to the inferiority of the masses: they are not fit to evaluate the choices available to them (I am also making a point abt democracy here). windows market share is due to heavy marketing ... when was the first time you saw a GNU/Linux ad on TV ? (I saw the IBM ad about 2 weeks ago) I saw the Microsoft "1 degree seperation" .NET ad about a year back (if i remember correctly).

However, look at the technical market for OSs and professional software ... almost every one of those runs on Unix and variants. The technical market knows their options, and more importantly understand them. This is the method I take the side on - make every company on Earth dependent on Linux, and the rest (your so-called shallow tool-Lusers) will follow. Morover i dont see anything "RICH" about about the dry packages that comes with an MS-XP install (Solitaire, Minesweeper, Notepad, Wordpad, anything else ? oh yeah regedit). Whereas the basic install of PCQLinux .... I really LOVE gnofract4d and Celestia and OpenOffice ... that pretty much makes for a VERY rich user experience than XP could hope for (then again i'm talking from the viewpoint of a _legal_ basic installation :) )

I remind you again ... i am not decrying linux .... of FSF. I am myself a strong supporter and have followed linux from its nacence.

On a side note, a "strong" supporter would call it GNU/Linux not merely linux ;) just joking ...

Rajeev J Sebastian Stendek R&D Kochi

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