Re: Trouble with fortran compiler
On Tuesday 03 May 2005 19:25, Jose Luis Iguain wrote:
> It is a 64-bit version. They not offer the sources but the rpm's.
Absence of source code is, in and of itself, an extremely good reason *not* to
install a piece of software.
If you haven't read the source code, you don't know what a program is doing.
*ALL* the problems we are seeing in the Windows world -- viruses, adware,
spyware, driver incompatibilities -- are *DIRECTLY* related to the fact that
people are not being allowed access to the source code.
Even if you aren't a hacker, you should still be concerned to have the source
code. You might think now that you will never have a need for it. But maybe
there is some problem that the original programmer never thought of, or some
feature you would like to have added. With the source code, any sufficiently
competent programmer can make improvements. Imagine if you had to call in
the original builder of your house everytime a tap washer failed, or you
wanted to hang new curtains, or put in an extra power socket?!
The whole point of the GNU project was to give ordinary users access to source
code, not lock it up with corporations. In the early days, the Linux kernel
would change so much from one release to the next that binaries compiled
against one kernel would not work with any other kernel -- which had the
beneficial side-effect that you would *NEED* the source code to install any
program. Now that the kernel is more mature and stable, some people are
thinking they can get away with supplying only a binary. This is a
destructive trend that we must resist with everything we have.
After all, what is in the source code that they do not want us to see?
--
AJS
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