Fedora and MP3

Posted Apr 13, 2006 12:00 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

ESR was the one (to hear him tell it anyway, and I believe it's agreed he
was indeed influential) who convinced Netscape to open their source, and
start what became the Mozilla project.

FWIW, with The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and the essays that followed from
it, he also put into words the ethics and social mores of much of the
FLOSS community. I know that my own thoughts on the matter evolved as I
became a hobbyist developer on MSWormOS, and eventually felt unwelcome
enough on the platform (with eXPrivacy actively discouraging my continued
participation -- I would have had to go illegal to continue with MS and
upgrade to eXPrivacy, but fortunately Linux was there for me), that I was
forced to emigrate to Linux. Shortly thereafter I purchased the book of
the same name, and began reading those essays. It was an amazing
experience, as time and again, I found I was reading my own thoughts and
reliving my own discovery process, in words written by someone who didn't
even know me. The essay of the title was, it is claimed, the thing that
triggered the process that ultimately led to the freeing of the Mozilla
code.

ESR is quite the controversial person, and many believe the reception he
got for that series of essays went to his head. Others point out that
what he described was the ideal, that the reality isn't always so pure.
Be that as it may, if you've not read them, I seriously recommend that you
do so. Whether you agree with most of what he says therein or not, you'll
find yourself better understanding what motivates a not-small portion of
the FLOSS community, and possibly even, your own motives. It was quite
the personal epiphany here, and those ideals form the basis for why I can
never go back to slaveryware aka proprietaryware. I really /did/ leave
the land of software slavery, defecting as it were, to the land of
software freedom, and just as many a political defector, I cannot, I will
not, go back, ever, unless the former land of slavery becomes itself a
land of freedom.

Duncan