On Tuesday October 21 2008 04:04:41 pm benjamin gramlich wrote: > I think it's difficult to make the case that free software helps to > preserve our personal freedom. Free software really only benefits those > who have the knowledge to make use of the access to source code. This is demonstrably false. I don't code. At all. I haven't written an original line of code since the fourth grade. But when I found a bug (or rather, a "mis-feature") in my music player (gmusicbrowser, released under gpl3) I wrote the developer an email saying "here's my problem," and in the next version it was fixed. If it hadn't been, I could have asked someone else who knows perl to help me fix it, or paid someone else who knows perl to do it for me. In a nutshell, I didn't even look at the code, and I (in a personal and immediate way) benefited from the free software development process. > The true threat to my freedom is my dependence upon another's generosity > for my employment and thus my livelihood. Or illegal wire tapping. Or > gerrymandering. Let's flip those second two examples just slightly. "Wire-tapping" can be trivially accomplished these days with the non-free software in your own phone. The 21st century equivalent of gerrymandering seems to be non-free software in voting machines. Would you say that those are threats to your freedom? -p. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081022/e739e845/attachment-0001.htm