good practical article
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick2 May 03, 2006 9:21 AM EDT |
"you care what happens to your data. If you are using proprietary software, it could eat your data. If bugs cause it to eat data, you cannot have them fixed. You can not ask another programmer outside the company who made the software to look at the code for you to see if it eats data or not." "What if your old hardware dies, but you want to continue running your favorite programs? What if the parts to recreate the hardware no longer exist? The binaries are complied to only run on certain kinds of hardware, so if you had the source code, you could recompile the program to run on your new system. You could hire a programmer to make whatever modifications are needed to have it run on your new system. With free software, having the source code means freedom to continue running whatever program it is that you like regardless of the availability of the old hardware. " etc. Good stuff. |
| grouch May 03, 2006 12:26 PM EDT |
tuxchick2: All you zealots are alike! You constantly want to steal away the users' freedom to choose to have their data eaten, to choose to not keep old software going, to choose a single throat to choke in the event of software failure. Who you gonna sue when that so-called free software causes the collapse of the entire world economy? Are you really going to let that conniving RMS and FSF take over your computer just so you can recompile a bunch of old tarballs? Don't you know he's out to end all users' freedom to choose innovation? [Oops! Sorry, wrong frequency. Back in this world, and hopefully somewhat related to what you said...] A point I didn't see in the article is that "abandonware" doesn't apply to free software. If a vendor of a closed source product fades away, all users of that product are left swinging in the wind. Any piece of free software can remain viable so long as anyone has an interest in maintaining it. The source, and therefore the user's data, does not get locked away when the originator abandons it. |
| tuxchick2 May 03, 2006 2:02 PM EDT |
I see, you are really advocating freedom from choice. Dang, that's so simple it's brilliant! "A point I didn't see in the article is that "abandonware" doesn't apply to free software. If a vendor of a closed source product fades away, all users of that product are left swinging in the wind. Any piece of free software can remain viable so long as anyone has an interest in maintaining it. The source, and therefore the user's data, does not get locked away when the originator abandons it." That's a big one. I wonder how many antique servers that should have been retired years ago are still running for this very reason? |
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