Re: [Somewhat OT] Closed source software Was [Re: Hmmm. A question. Was [Re: Debian is losing its users]]

[Hal Vaughan <hal@thresholddigital.com>]

On Friday 04 April 2008, Michael C wrote:
...
> There's the rub. There are practical/political impediments to the
> exercise of genuine software freedom (the whole panoply of patents,
> NDAs etc.) which no software license, no matter how "progressive",
> could ever hope to effectively combat. So it follows that if there's
> to be real software freedom, it would have to be predicated on new
> and transformed social, political and economic arrangements.

I'm not sure we don't have a large amount of freedom now.  Actually, I 
feel that more important than whether or not a a program is open source 
is the ability to pick which product we want for a specific need.  In 
that way, I'd consider the current OS monopoly more of a hindrance on 
freedom than that same company selling closed source products.

> But Stallman's is a utopian position, because in place of concrete
> political and economic analyses of capitalism, all he really has to
> offer politically is vague talk about extending Free Software's moral
> example into other social spheres.

I would agree, but on the other hand, I'll ask how we're ever to try to 
reach or build a Utopia if we don't have a few that dare to live and 
believe as if we are already there.

Hal