
"Yesterday my desktop died, and so I went ahead and got a brand new Windows 8 laptop. It's always been my feeling that as years go on, user experience has been going down for people who use a computer and the Internet, because of decisions all companies make that are clearly anti-user, either because they think they know best, or in many cases, for financial gains. But from spending all night reinstalling everything and customizing the laptop,
I realized just how bad it has become." Probably the biggest reason to go Mac or Linux. Such a shame Microsoft found it more important to pressure OEMs into silly Secure Boot nonsense instead of doing something about the anti-user crapware disaster. Goes to show who Microsoft cares about. Hint: it ain't you.
Member since:
2007-02-17
BSD doesn't try to redefine the word freedom. They state what you are free to do with the license and that is the end of it. It's the GPL that capitalizes and redefines freedom in a creepy newspeak fashion.
Researchers share and hide their work depending on the situation, don't act like academia is one big hippie share fest.
No you tried perpetrating a common GPL myth that the software world was some open source utopia before the ebil proprietary companies showed up.
Money and proprietary software are not mutually exclusive. Anyways Thomson and Ritchie worked for Bell labs which was funded by AT&T. It wasn't an open source project so I'm not sure where you are going with this.
I think you might have bought into a few myths from the the cult of the GPL. That's understandable given how widely accepted they are on places like Slashdot. "
One man's freedom is another man's prison, I suppose.
BTW, FOSS software claims to be "freedom software" from a user's point of view, not a commercial developer's point of view. Since the vast majority of people are computer users not developers, this point of view is by far the most relevant. It also means that true FOSS software is largely written by its own users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Manifesto
The GNU Manifesto begins by outlining the goal of the project GNU, which stands for GNU's Not Unix. The current contents of GNU at the time of writing are then described and detailed. Richard Stallman then goes into an explanation of why it is important that they complete this project. The reason he explains is based on Unix becoming a proprietary software. It then explains how people can contribute to the project, and also why computer users will benefit from the project.
You seem to have utterly confused this point. The BSD license, for example, allows a commercial developer the complete freedom to take BSD-licensed code, re-package and re-sell it within another commercial closed-source application, and thereby completely screw over the end users.
Edited 2012-11-12 11:46 UTC