On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 22:01, Marek Habersack wrote: > > As for coding alternatives, I've written a small chunk of Free Software over > > the years. Whether it's an alternative to something that only existed in > > non-free form previously, I can't honestly say. But certainly free > > alternatives to non-free software have been written - xpdf as an alternative > > to acroread, kaffe as an alternative to the Sun JDK, and Mono and dotGNU as > > an alternative to .NET. What exactly the authors of those free alternatives > > were motivated by, I truly cannot say, but it's entirely possible that part > > of the motivation was because they were non-free, people stood up and > > publically said so, and someone thought "I'd really like a Free Software > > version of that piece of software". > I fully agree with you on that and you've given very worthy examples of > applications that replace the non-free ones. But note one thing - NONE of > their authors came moaning that "acrobat is bad, it has to be removed, guys, > remove it" - but they sat down and wrote the software. And what I was > talking about were people who go talking about something being wrong, about > politics, theoritizing and pointing fingers but doing nothing in order to > change anything. If somebody comes and says "the tg driver is bad, because > it is non free and I will remove it" and offers no alternative then, in my > book, that person loses _all_ the credibility as a software developer and > a person that can be trusted to do some task which requires responsibility. So, if no free alternative exists, any proprietary program (whether we have a legal right to distribute or not) can be in Debian if someone packages it. (Don't respond with "I'm not saying that", because you are.) No, really, what the fuck are you smoking? Did you lose your place on the road to SuSE or something? Debian consists *only free software* whether or not some non-free program exists that can do something novel. (P.S. I have, with various people, freely reimplemented two entire (music, graphics, code) proprietary games because I want to avoid non-free software. So, don't lecture me about sitting down and coding.) > But it might be just me. If it's not, I fear greatly for the future of free software. :( -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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