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Open Source: A license, a community or more?
,----[ Quote ]
| To Richard Stallman, founder of the Free
| Software Foundation, a "non-free program"
| - i.e., proprietary software - represents
| an attack on your freedom. See this
| interview he granted Jolie O'Dell:
|
| Stallman believes that even a patent
| violates this freedom. (He's not the only
| one in the open source community to feel
| this way.)
`----
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/61502
Use value and free software
,----[ Quote ]
| Why business is good
|
| Let us see how we have needed companies
| that exploit our free software commons. Let
| us see how they have actually added not
| only capital for themselves, but actual
| use value for all of us.
|
| In the late 1980s, before the Internet or
| the Linux project existed, a few guys
| realized that the GNU C compiler, the GDB
| debugger and Emacs made a pretty damn good
| set of developer tools, and decided to
| sell them to developers and support them.
| They listened to customers and fixed bugs,
| added features, and customized the tools
| for individual companies and users. The
| GNU project was not interested in doing
| any of this, so the users were better off
| paying Cygnus to do it for them. Cygnus
| was adding real use value to the GNU
| tools. Soon the company noticed that the
| GNU project was really slow in integrating
| their improvements to the official
| compiler tree, so they were left with no
| choice other than forking it. Eventually,
| the FSF realized that Cygnusâ version was
| far superior to them, and adopted it as
| official. Cygnus pretty much became the
| maintainers of the GNU C compiler.
|
| The GNOME project was created in 1997 to
| create a free desktop for GNU-based
| systems. It succeeded because Red Hat
| hired developers to work on it. Red Hat
| got a nice desktop for themselves, and the
| GNU project got a free desktop. Red Hat
| made sure the potential use value was
| created.
|
| In 2010, we are complaining when
| Canonical, Red Hat and Novell are leading
| the evolution of desktop systems, and IBM,
| Oracle, and others are in charge of the
| kernel. Why do we complain? What we are
| witnessing is the reconciliation of use
| value and exchange value. Everybody wins
| when commercial free software succeeds.
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http://www.siltala.net/2010/04/11/use-values-and-free-softwar/
Recent:
Licensing Woes of Proprietary Software
,----[ Quote ]
| Don't get me wrong, migrating away from any
| proprietary application can be very time
| consuming and costly. However, in the big
| picture, migrating to open source software
| will save in the long run. The migration is a
| one-time move, after that move is done no
| more upgrades and licenses need to be
| purchased ever again. There are also many
| many other bonuses to using open source
| software that will add up over time. Open
| source software is free as in freedom, and is
| developed by the community, not a single
| entity behind closed doors.
`----
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,2000643222b,00.htm?new_comment
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