Free Software 2004 (Register)

Posted Feb 10, 2004 22:02 UTC (Tue) by randomblast (guest, #19347) [Link]

I agree with most things in that speech, and he's right about maintaining
our freedom, we should always use the free alternative if it works, but i
don't think using one or two proprietary apps means we
have given up our freedom.
Not everybody can afford to give away their software, especially with
games (Quake III, Unreal Tournament 2003, Neverwinter Nights are the big
3 that have ported to Linux)
I don't mind paying for those kinds of things, and yes, i do feel that
id, Atari, Bioware, and all the others are contributing to the Linux
community.
And without other non-Free software like Maya and Winex/Crossover Wine,
Linux users would miss out on using that software, but also Linux would
not be as popular, and a lot of users would switch to inferior and
non-Free operating systems, and the likes of id, Atari, and Bioware would
not port their software, so we would be missing out on that aswell, and
then we would lose some other users, which would discourage other
developers away from porting their software...
The snowball effect works both ways (or something like that :p)

That said, what's that about having speakers from M$ at a Linux expo?
That's just wrong.