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Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentZacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessmentPosted Jul 5, 2012 7:43 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment by lxoliva Parent article: Zacchiroli: working with FSF on Debian Free-ness assessment
Don't you agree that the lack of freedoms in the latter, that presumably leads you to choose the former, would be detrimental (and thus harmful) to you, no matter how much you need the features offered by the software? Don't try moving the goal posts. Your contrived scenario has nothing to do with what I posted earlier. Of course if the two packages differ only in that one is free and the other is non-free, it makes more sense to pick the free one. However, I already explained that I personally use non-free software only if it does something I need and there is no free software available which does the same thing. Hence your premise doesn't apply to the situation I was talking about. You may argue that in this case it is better to write a free piece of software that implements the missing functionality. This is true in an ideal world where programming takes no effort. In the real world I don't always have the time and wherewithal on top of my regular project load to, say, reverse-engineer and reimplement a complex undocumented proprietary communication protocol to do something that is only an ancillary part of my actual work. In other cases I have written free software that does what I require. This is not a black-and-white world.
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