Re: Free bigot flame burning, time to think.
On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 08:09:20PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 12:25:32AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 01:08:02PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > > Then why to the opponents to non-free removal continue to trot out examples
> > > of "essential" bits of non-free software, even after the free alternatives
> > > have been developed for what was once "essential" non-free software?
> >
> > Because they haven't been in all cases.
>
> Depends on what your standard of "alternative" is.
>
> For instance, a lot of people feel that Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon, et
> al. are all viable Free replacements for Netscape 4.77. Others don't.
This is a convenient example because for most people, Mozilla et al have
replaced Netscape. Netscape 477 crashes so often that I am happy to
leave it behind, even though Mozilla doesn't work with my bank's online
banking site.
However there are other examples where there is no alternative. For
example, xpdf-japanese and similar packages for ghostscript are required
for viewing PDF and Postscript documents in Japanese. Similarly for
other Asian languages.
They all need non-free character map data from Adobe. It don't think it
is impossible to replace that data with a freely licensed equivalent.
However, that has not happened yet.
Interestingly, the non-free materials are not source code, but data, in
the form of PostScript text. I suspect that makes it more difficult than
source code to replace.
I suggest that the proponents of the GR stop touting the Mozilla example
and consider this one instead.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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