[Fsf-india] FEATURE: Open source, free software ... in the Third World (long)

[Khuzaima A. Lakdawala]

Raj:

> > This is clearly not an article about Free Software.
> 
> With due respect to you, I must say that this is a crazy method to
> ascertain whether an article is about Free Software or not.

Sorry, I shouldn't have been so glib about it. It's just that I was so
mad at reading hundreds of lines repeatedly saying the same thing
(low-cost, no-cost, low-price, no-price ad infinitum) that I couldn't
think of a normal response at that time. Hope you will bear with me
for the detailed explanation below.

Journalists, especially those involved in value-based journalism like
Frederick, play an extremely important (even powerful) role in
moulding public opinion. The general public (lay computer users) are
going to form their opinion about free software not by browsing THIS
mailing list but by reading articles by journalists like
Frederick. So, when articles such as the one in question propagate and
proliferate, becoming the public face of free software, people will
only associate free software with low-cost and nothing else. When 95%
of an article continuously and endlessly hammers on about low-cost,
no-cost, low-price, no-price, do you expect the lay readers to
magically notice the remaining 5% which mentions software freedom in
passing? Seriously?

If articles like these do become the public face of free software,
then in the not-too-distant future the only people remaining in the
free software movement will be writers and journalists. What about the
free software programmers? They will all have starved to death of
course. Thanks to the low-cost rhetoric of today, all avenues for
making a decent living out of free software will have been closed
shut.

And do you think the future software customers will pay any heed when
our pauper programmer tells them "It's not about cost, it's about
freedom, don't you get it?" They obviously won't because by then it
will have been drilled into their heads that free software is all
about low-cost low-cost low-cost low-cost low-cost. Freedom? What
freedom?


-- 
Khuzaima A. Lakdawala