On 07/04/2015 10:40 AM, Jan Gloser wrote:
I am not an active member of the debian community, just a listener on this thread, but you got my attention. I also admire free software makers although I think one must always keep in mind the reality of the world and the rules of the game called 'trade'.
(snipped the rest of the message)It appears to me that throughout your reply you used the word "free" to refer to zero price. In Lumin's original post he was not referring to price, but to freedom.
I personally know people that have businesses based on free(dom) software, and I know people that get paid for implementing and customizing Free Software, for example.
That could be the reason behind your analogy with communism, which turns out to be out of bounds. The Free Software community is not against trade or capitalism at all. Maybe some individuals do, but that's another story. In fact, Free Software is legally based on Copyright law.
When RMS emphasizes about "freedom, not price" it means precisely that, but the message could not be so obvious. For example, we in Spanish call it "Software Libre" as opposed to "Software Gratis". Many people use it because it has zero price and that's ok too, but when people ask me if a piece of software is "gratis" (for free) I reply that yes, but furthermore, it is also "libre" (liberty).
Compare, for example, with the Flash player for Windows, which you can download for free but you don't have a legal freedom to create derivative copies. That's not what we are talking about.
Best regards.