Not 100% sure

Posted Dec 20, 2007 2:37 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (guest, #421)
In reply to: Not 100% sure by mingo
Parent article: Insufficiently free?

I think it's plain and obvious that the more free software someone uses, the better it is for free software in general. How Richard can claim that using 99% un-free software plus 1% free software is better than using 99% free software plus 1% un-free software is beyond my abilities to comprehend.

He does not claim that. As far as I can tell, he argues that the people using 99% non-free systems are using them primarily because of the 99% that is non-free, and that the 1% that is unlikely to be the deciding factor.

Whether efforts to avoid pointing users of 99% free systems to use 1% of non-free software have a net positive effect (by spurring more demand for free software) or negative effect (by driving users away) on free software is a matter of opinion, depending at least in part about what values and goals you have for free software. And even if we all had the same values and goals, it is not as if we have any hard data on this question.

Reasonable people can disagree about these things. But pretending that questions of opinion and differences of values are actually questions of fact is not conducive to a reasonable exchange of ideas.