Hi Glenn, Il 13/11/2002 alle 15:53:09, +1100, Glenn McGrath ha scritto: > It comes down to how pragmatic a person is as to how they value Free v's > Open Source Software, some people are prepared to sacrifice a little > freedom to have some luxuries today. Its a personal decision. > If i understand you correctly, your sentence implies that Open Source Software or in general non-free software is of a better quality, at least on luxuries..., than free software. Is that really true? I'm not sure, this way of dividing categories is more a common place than a fact. At least as far it concerns Multimedia i can tell you that is not true. With the DeMuDi project we wanted exactly to prove that not only free software applications are equal or superior to non-free but we are sure that 100% GNU/Linux + free software compeetes with no problems with other platform considered to be the *top* on this field, read Mac OS9/OSX . Actually making debian 100% free software only would help the free software community a lot, since all those package leaving in the limbo will get over the little existing resistence to become real free software, there would not be anymore an excuse to live in a limbo and the free software community would find some new energies and reason to fill the gap, if and when they exists with non-free, because you might find those gap, but they are not so frequent, in me humble opinion. Plus, and this an important consideration, at lest for those living in Europe, i dont know much about legislationsin other countries. European Commision, even if they do it with a kind of schizophrenic policy, is pushing toward the free software development, both with grants and by strongly suggesting to local administrations to use free software. I think this is another good reason to forget non-free and focuse only on free software. Best, marco trevisani -- ************************************************************************ * marco trevisani * * http://trevisani.mine.nu marco@centrotemporeale.it * * http://www.agnula.org -- A GNU/Linux Audio Distribution * * Neither MS-Word nor MS-PowerPoint attachments please: * * See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html * * Gpg Fingerprint = 6096 84B8 046C A5C9 B538 255E 9FFF 1121 3AFB FFA6 * ************************************************************************
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