[Fsf-friends] Re: FREE SOFTWARE THAT IS GOOD ...

Mahesh T. Pai paivakil@vsnl.net
Fri May 7 23:27:02 IST 2004


Harish Narayanan said on Fri, May 07, 2004 at 12:03:03PM -0400,:

 > A primary reason they aren't as wide spread are 
 > because of societal inertia,

<snip> 
 
 > Do I want it installed? No.
 > Do I need it installed? Not really.
 > Am I one of the 210 million who paid for it anyway? Yes.
 > Did I have much of a choice? Yes and no.

See??

You had a choice, did not exercise it, and blame `intertia'?

Huh??  Did you  say `What  about the  greenbacks I  paid?'? We  have a
restrictive trade practises law much stronger than that of US of A.
 
 > I could have tried really hard to find a company that sells a

Inertia, is the word.

The  largest  and oldest  hardware-cum-software  vendor  in the  world
supports GNU/Linux  on their  PCs. May  be you did  not ask  the right
question? 

 > RedHat is a major supporter of many free software projects,

Yes ...

 >  and  doesn't  ship   anything  proprietary  with  their  operating
 > systems.

Not very sure  of that.  Maybe, going by hearsay,  this holds good for
the free-as-in-beer version  of RH which we used  to get till sometime
back. Cannot  say the same for the  paid version. I have  not used the
paid version,  so dunno.  Hope somebody will  clarify on  whether paid
isos from RH contain non-free binaries.

Tha apart, a major component of the RPM system is considered non-free
by Debian since its license imposes burdens on users.

 >  I respect them for this,

Me too.

-- 
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~+
                                          
  Mahesh T. Pai, LL.M.,                   
  'NANDINI', S. R. M. Road,               
  Ernakulam, Cochin-682018,               
  Kerala, India.                          
                                          
  http://paivakil.port5.com         
                                          
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