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quick reviewquick reviewPosted Feb 14, 2003 13:08 UTC (Fri) by mwilck (guest, #1966)In reply to: quick review by iabervon Parent article: The Art of Unix Programming It depends what you mean by "better". Of course, the GPL freedoms add values and usefulness to everyone (you can share the program legally with others, you can improve it to suit your needs, you can have independent parties scrutinize it). It is not clear to me to which extent ESR is not talking about these added values when he says "free software is better". I suspect a to very little extent - he means "technically better", nothing but, in the sense in which Bitkeeper is better than CVS and Microsoft Word better than Kword. This is what many non-technical users will probably also do, especially because it hardly matters to them if copying stuff is legal or not. I think it is possible to convey the benefits of free software to non-technical users, too. A democratic constitution gives its citizens a lot of rights many of them never exert - nevertheless it seems to be clear that people still appreciate that they have these rights. Just repeating the message "free software is technically better" without talking about the additional freedoms is dangerous. You may convince more people in the short run, but you risk to loose them when they come to believe that proprietary software is technically superior.
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