Re: Free vs proprietary [was: how to use fetchmail with MS Office 365 / davmail?]
tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
>> No insult tomas - it's reality. One small tree can not stand the
>> avalanche.
>
> It is -- you said "nobody is doing anything". But there are folks
> doing something. Declaring them non-existent is perhaps the worst
> insult possible.
>
> Whether they succeed (or rather: how much and what they accomplish)
> is, of course, up to debate.
>
OK, so you want me to say it in a different way. Despite there were some
efforts to do something, the result is zero. I hope you feel better now.
In fact I wanted to say that we should try to do something - especially
people with influence and power ... it's complicated topic, which I do not
want to discuss here and in public. With the "political correctness"
dictatorship now everywhere ... I hope you understand.
The fact is there was some effort around 2005, but it died before it was
born or if you like it was born dead. Very sad!
>> > 2. it is defaetist "the others have won, anyway, just accept it
>> > and give up". No. Truss up your sleeves ;-)
>> >
>>
>> No give up - we have to bring it to the next level - if it is not handled
>> at political level, you can indeed drink a glass of water and go play
>> with linux in your basement soon.
>
> Of course it is political. That's why there are political organisations
> doing good ol' lobby work. Since you talk Europe, have a look at FSFE's
> campaign "Public Money, Public Code" [1], which is directed at EU
> politicians to convince them that whenever public money is spent on
> making code, this code should have a free license.
>
20y - nothing! IMO this is more important than climate change, but may be it
is hard to convince the audience. I personally gave up around 2007
> As those things go, "we haven't won" (you never do, in politics), but
> there is some amount of success.
>
> And there is a bunch of EU parliament MEPs who do understand those
> things pretty well (look up, for example Julia Reda [2] who isn't
> MEP anymore, but did an outstanding job there).
>
Again - result is zero! Respect to the people, who try to do something
useful there, but it is the same as we talking here.
>> Also there is nothing going on in Europe anymore (at least not
>> significant except SuSE). There is a lot to discuss about and someone
>> must stand for this what happened in the past 15y - especially after
>> 2008.
>
> Those things have become international anyway. SuSE is as much European
> as Debian is Oceanic. This [3] isn't perhaps the newest data, but has
> a nice pic. Looking at this pic, EU doesn't look underrepresented. Rather
> Asia, Africa and big parts of South America, esp. Brazil (although
> they have Mageia :-)
>
You shift the perspective. I put the focus on what started developing open
source. I have not heard about Africa or whoever from the "under
represented" dealing with computers and free and open source software, when
it was being fought a fight here. In fact many do not even care how and why
they are able to use internet, smart phone and whatever they do. FSF and
Linux did impact the history of computing. I hope you understand what I
mean.
>> > 3. it's not fun. And that is perhaps the biggest crime on the
>> > spirit of computing. Alan Perlis [2] must know!
>> >
>>
>> What do you mean?
>
> Did you read his quote? Fun in computing is the most important (I'd
> tend to agree with him). Doing free software is bound to be more
> fun for many reasons (the margin of this mail is too narrow to
> write them all down). Ergo...
>
Ergo ... when the freedom is taken from you, you will do the computing with
the stick in the sand.
>> > 4. it could be a poisonous meme planted by "our opponents".
>> > Where did you pick that up?
>>
>> What do you mean?
>
> Demoralisation [4]. A classical trick of the trade. Now I'm not
> insinuating that our opponents are Nazis (the first example in the
> ref is pretty unfortunate, alas) -- but that kind of trick is of
> course played in any commercial endeavour. There are companies
> you pay money to do that. Business as usual.
>
The freedom is being taken away - step by step, hour after hour, while we
chat here about the new face of crap MS Office and Corporates imposes on
us.
> Cheers
>
> [1] https://publiccode.eu/
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda
> [3] https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.debian-internals.html
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_%28warfare%29
>
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