On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 00:56 -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > I had dinner with Richard M. Stallman (RMS) tonight. He is an interesting > and impressive person but also a very quirky character and somewhat > argumentative. Agreed. He is extremely pedantic and unrelenting in his search for truth and justice through logic--damn the torpedoes. Seems like he only fulfills the bare minimum social grace requirement. I guess I was prepared for that, so it didn't really surprise me. He's apt to argue with anything! That said, I still can't help but be inspired by him... I think he has found some truth and logic and contradicts conventional wisdom. > Aside from the funny stuff, it was interesting to hear him talk about free > software. He says that proprietary software is unethical. I need to hear > more from him about ethics. I've read a lot of his stuff but I don't > understand why proprietary software is immoral, at least I don't > understand it well enough to convince anyone else. I interpret the unethical part to be "proprietary software robs us of our freedoms". That's unethical, right? If you buy an iPhone, you agree to let Apple lock you into their software because of the Digital Restrictions Management stuff on the phone. You cannot do whatever you want with that iPhone. That's unethical, right? If I buy hardware, I should be able to run whatever I want on it. > I know why I don't > like it and why I want to avoid it, but that is based on years of bad > experiences with it (and good experiences with free software), not on a > philosophical argument. Agreed, this is why I use Free² Software, too! I feel like "they already thought of everything", and the GNU utilities and GNU C library are quite excellent implementations. Fast, well documented, simple, useful. They run on any hardware. Non-Free² software is often more convenient... I think most people *don't* care that proprietary software "robs us of our freedoms", and just want to get done whatever they're doing on a computer as fast as possible. Non-Free² software is also marketed much more heavily. So, how do I convince someone that they must care about their freedoms? -- Adam Monsen -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081021/880098c8/attachment.pgp