Re: Flame against non-free burning, time to think.
On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, Branden Robinson wrote:
> I switched from pine to mutt a few years ago, and did not find it
> difficult. Back then I didn't even know about the pine-ish keybinding
> muttrc phenomenon (maybe remapping keys wasn't even supported in mutt
> 0.59 or whatever it was -- it was long time ago).
I tried it last year, and didn't like it too much. That's my own fault
though, not Debian's. I started on Pine back my short-lived University
days because that was all there was on their system, and stuck with it.
If it came down to it, I'd just download the .tar.gz's, and install it
myself where I need it
I notice that people tend to stick with what they know, what's commonly
used, or even just what they like. If not that, they stick with what they
started with because they are either afraid of something new, or the
energy to break the entry barrier is higher than they want to exert.
I'm glad I didn't stick with the slackware 3.x or whatever it was at the
time back in '96 when i first started in Linux, and instead moved over to
Debian a year or two later, because I'd heard how much easier and better
package management is. Dselect was certainly scary back then. "There's
HOW many packages on that list there, Dan?"
Haven't looked back, although I hear slackware is much better than the
manual .tgz's of back then.
I still prefer dselect, and work around it's quirks(which seem to be
fewer and fewer as time goes on). I find it quite powerful as long as
you know what you want to do. I generally use apt-get for cleaning up
what dselect doesn't (clean/autoclean/purges), and just seeing what's
available with apt-cache.
> By many standards, mutt is *already* a pine replacement (not to mention
> elm-me, mh, evolution, kmail, etc. etc. etc.), plus there's the problem
> that we already can't ship modified pine binaries, even in non-free,
> because of the license.
Indeed, and I wish a horde of Debian users were able to storm UW's campus,
showing them how non-sensical UW's policy is.
> So, what *are* you really using non-free for? Just because vrms lists
I also use the non-free components of Netscape, but I can quite live
without that. I haven't bothered fixing up the fonts besides what
blueHeart needs in icewm, and what xterm uses, so fonts in Netscape are
too small for me to read anyways. Doesn't matter, that's not my reason
for running X.(see below)
> Anyway, what concerns me about the demands that non-free be kept until
> there is a "replacement" in free is exactly the argument you're
> proposing. You want much more than just a replacement -- you want a
> clone. That's setting the bar awfully high. With that logic people
> wouldn't migrate from Windows to Linux in the first place.
That's a reflection of what I said above though. If you could take
MS Office and clone it, and clone (editors note: I originally had Outlook
here, and realized at the end of this paragraph just horrible that would be),
how many more people would move over? But of those, how many would
understand the freedoms and choices that free software has given them?
But anyways, I run icewm mainly to have, at 1600x1200, 4 or so xterm's per
screen open to various systems at the office, times 4 desktops. So I'm
really not a good example of a typical debian user. :)
Until a few months ago I just used all 12 vt's, with screen and splitvt.
Mike
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