clajeun@gmail.com

Thanks!

(You are amazing by the way!)

But it isn’t about ‘ideas’ either (someone just watched V for Vendetta again or something?).

It’s about freedom – of people. It’s about the freedom of people to use and share – but without the freedom to refuse those rights to other people. And increasingly it’s about the freedom of citizens to interact with their own government and take part in their own country’s future.

It’s definitely not about ideas, although it is based on one: `freedom’.

I also think you’re discounting the worth of being able to pay anybody to work on the software if you are unable to yourself – this is a very very important and extremely valuable feature of free software.

And at the end of the day, the physical software is still important – you need this to perform the work and implement the ideas. This is why free software is so much more valuable, no single entity can take it away from everyone else. Given how much it costs to make good software, being able to avoid the waste is economically important as well.

The need to hire someone to do one’s work is not freedom. Other than having a wider choice on developers to hire, it might as well be proprietary software.

uhm, you are missesing the fact that for non-free software, there is no choice at all as to who to hire, it is the author and no one else, which means not only that i can’t negotiate a good price to get the work done, but in many cases i can’t negotiate at all because the author does not care to fix a problem for a single user.

and even as a non-programmer, i can take advantage of others peoples fixes. in many cases the chance is that i don’t need to hire anyone to fix my problem, i just need to ask around to find out if someone else already fixed the problem and then use that.

for non-free software such fixes just don’t exist.

greetings, eMBee.

I came to linux after u$ obsoleted my computer and its software (W98, a POS that I had come to terms with), forcing me to purchase XP in order to maintain my productivity. I vowed that it would be my last u$ purchase. Once I had XP installed, I started my Linux learning experience in the dual boot mode. My only use for XP now is to view some proprietary file formats that Linux software and my mature DVD player can’t open. I don’t care for Window$ any more but overall, it is a matter of what I am used to than anything else…and why would I want to enslave myself to Redmond’s whims again? I roll my own desktops and have no need for lap/nettops or smartphonies (they are too damned small for “mature” eyes to see, designed by and for adolescents). What a trog, right?

My programming experience, all in Pascal, is pretty obsolete and mostly forgotten now and my attention span has deteriorated to the point that learning the newer languages is beyond me.I am grateful to the developers of “libre” software who protect my freedom and I make what financial contributions I can, providing what feedback I can and trying to help others in the forums when I don’t need the help myself.