[Fsf-friends] Comrades’ new-found love with IT

[justin joseph]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Sebin Jacob <sebinajacob at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I do not know who used the logo of FSF-India. However I too feel that for
>> the cause of free software they should not have used logo of a private
>> company which does not even have a democratic structure.
>
> Dear Keraleean,
>
> Are you suggesting that private company / ownership is a bad thing in
> itself? AFAIK, the Free Software stands for property rights.
>
> "Some people think free software goes against the principal of property
> ownership. However, if I buy a CD at the store, intellectual property says I
> don't have ownership rights of a CD. If I did, I could do anything with it I
> wanted to. Without the bizarre intellectual property game, I own what I
> buy." - Jonathan Bartlett
> And what is bad in a private company?
>
> Canonical is a private company. Red Hat is a private company. Many private
> companies are already having sustainable business models built on FS.
>
> For instance,
>
> * Perl is supported by the publisher who makes money from Perl books.
> * GCC and the Win32 port of many GNU tools is supported by Cygnus/RedHat who
> sell support/consulting services
> * Various open source initiatives have been supported by Sun make their OS
> more standard/enhanced.
> * Apache has been supported by IBM, Sun, and others for their own reasons
>
> These business models have been around for *years* and they show no signs of
> disappearing anytime soon.
>
> One business model that's often overlooked isn't really a business model.
> Companies that depends on software that they don't want to specialize in
> creating (e.g. a software company that doesn't want to create a custom
> installation package) will often contribute to an existing open source
> project that specializes in that area (e.g. RPM) because it saves them the
> money and resources it develop an inhouse solution. They contribute to the
> main stream of development because the don't want to keep patching their
> software against the new versions or because they want those features to be
> a defacto standard. - Anil Wang
>
> I have copy pasted both quotes from the comments of an early Linux Today
> article.
>
> Maybe, these arguments seem slightly away from your opposition. But what I
> was trying to say was, even if FSFI is a private company, they cannot be
> blamed for that.India's vote against OOXML in favor of ODF as ISO standard
> was made possible becouse of FSFI. If FSFI had a democratically elected

Had wanted some clarity on this for sometime now..  Are you saying
that India's vote against
OOXML(ODF was allready an Open Standard) was made possible *only*
because of FSF-I, or was made
possible *majorly* because of FSF-I or was made possible because of
FSF-I and other entities(one of many) efforts.
Or something like FSF-I co-ordinated all effort towards this, meaning
without the co-ordinating entity, there would
have been no effort.

What is FSF-I official position on this.

> organisational setup, the chapters like FSF Chennai would have been
> mushroomed overnight and it would have been hijacked by vested interest
> groups - let alone CPI(M). We have known such things in co-operative society
> / bank elections, here in Kerala for quite a long time.
>
> -Sebin
>
>
> --
> ...if I fought with you, if i fell wounded and allowed no one to learn of my
> suffering, if I never turned my back to the enemy: Give me your blessing!
> (Nikos Kazantzakis)
>
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>