2006/10/10, Dinesh Shah dineshah@gmail.com:
Dear Depankar,
On 10/10/06, dipankar das paagol@gmail.com wrote:
The people that are writing 'linux[sic]' can put forward a reason. And you are just feeling? Why don't go to some 3-paise romance societies: they will appreciate a lot your idiotic talk-smart stance.
No personal attacks please. And please stay on the topic.
It is easy to say 'sic' is sick. No admirable poetry this. This only diverts the attention from a serious discussion.
Collect all your favourite free software applications and go to their web sites and note down on what operating systems (and kernels) they run on. It will strike us all to see that most of them (actually almost all of them) are either ported, or were always ported to almost all the systems (including the proprietary systems). And then check what makes that portability possible? And then check again, what makes this portability and distribution possible with software freedom?
The application layer of our operating system can be regenerated on top of other kernels and operating systems not only today but in future too. You may want to get a glance of that from http://www.debian.org/ports/, though this is not comprehensive enough.
I see no reason why I should think of dispensing what is not dispensible, and see no reason why I cannot dispense what is dispensable. And then, I see no reason why this activism to discredit a creditable and indispensable contribution.
If the name 'Linux' was defined with the semantics of software freedom, this name issues wouldn't have arisen. People would have embraced it. On the contrary what we saw was active and vehement dissociation from it. That is the reason why GNU finds it difficult to exclusively talk of Linux, so they talk about it inclusively. GNU project adopted Linux with open arms, and promoted it with as much fervour as it did with other projects of their own. They acknowledged it everywhere. So, the GNU community feels betrayed when the community at large speaks excluding the name as well as their ideology.
We wish this symbiosis is sustained as well as acknowledged. How else to do that than GNU+Linux?
Regarding the idea of earning money: I am not repeating what is always said that free software business model is service oriented. But, what is often missed : It is unethical to make money by selling what is not sellable. It is unethical to make what is eminently copyable code into non-copyable code by technical means.
Proprietary software sells an artificial decoder and says it is their service. They seperate code from decoder for doing this. Free software says, artificial decoders' service cannot be equated with human decoders', and hence we should not have a price for software decoders. If we don't resist this temptation from business interests, let me warn you, IT will invent more and more software services, and will replace humans. That society will have only mega software governments who will create software slaves (and rule them too) and turn you and me also as slaves. In that society only a minority of us will be part of that and the rest will be exploited.
Since the knowledge of how to create an artificial decoder is no secret, for it is computer science, it cannot be made some industry's exclusive property. The only way to keep it with people forever is to do the way science is done. Computer science is no different from other sciences.
So, if you make a useful CAD application, sell it. Give warrenty to those who give you more money, to others give the applicatiion without warrenty and you can still charge them minimally or if you wish give it away gratis. You don't loose in this game, since your useful application will make you immortal, and your warrenty service will make you rich. You can see how ethical this plan is if you realize that the current propietary software applications that are sold to desktop users do not carry any warrenty (read the fine print), and they are still asking you money. This is unjustififed. They do sell warrenty to industries, not to you and me.
Also, counting who is majority and who is minority doesn't tell what is good. The point is to change the numbers.
Nagarjuna