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Packaging proprietary applicationsPackaging proprietary applicationsPosted Sep 12, 2003 14:51 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142)Parent article: A Brief Tour of New Distributions These are NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, multimedia applications with codecs of questionable legal status, Java, Flash, RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader and other commercial or unsupported applications. Please be more precise here. You mainly mentioned non-free or proprietary applications. Free Software can also be commercial. While installing and setting up all these is certainly possible ..., it requires some searching around the Internet as well as time and effort ... . Several distributions are attempting to fill the gap and come pre-installed and pre-configured with some or all the above mentioned software. Packaging proprietary software is a double edge sword. For the short term it seems good for users, but in the long run it prolongs non-free formats and keeps competitive Free Software down. I tend to value the long term freedom goals a lot higher.
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Free software is too free to control the world Posted Sep 13, 2003 16:08 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Unfortunately, free software is by its very nature unsuited to that sort of social engineering. People are free to use free software for anything, including advancing proprietary software and running down free software.It is only natural that if you distribute a free software package with features withheld for the global good, that someone will use your work to distribute a package with the features included, for local good. The Microsoft model is more appropriate for overcoming local selfishness for global good.
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