Quotes of the week

[Posted March 23, 2016 by n8willis]

[I] realized that is one reason why I am so invested in open source software. It's about possibilities.

Open source software exists because a developer saw something that didn't exist yet, and wrote a program to fill that need. As an open source community, we explore possibilities. How can we do this thing? And now that we've done that thing, how can we make it even better?

— Jim Hall

Some have added a third type of free: "free as in puppy". Like a puppy, adopting open source software has ongoing cost.

— Ben Cotton (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 24, 2016 2:10 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

"free as in puppy"

This is from an old anti-Linux talking points from Microsoft. There was a time when at nearly every Microsoft channel partner meeting the Microsoft speaker's children had just been given a free puppy and an analogy was made by the speaker about dealing with Linux.

The speaker's obvious lie and co-opting their home life to make commercial point caused less positivity than the US-based speakers may have expected.

Quotes of the week

Posted Mar 30, 2016 6:39 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

I, too, was reminded of the old total-cost-of-ownership marketing by Microsoft and other unfree software vendors.

But Ben Cotton makes another point: /maintaining/ free software has direct financial costs, and, like buying a helmet for your volunteer fire duty, should give you tax benefits.

The quote did not transport this well, but IMO the „free as in puppy“ should be scrapped altogether. Even if it did not stem from antagonistic marketing, it still evokes „free as in {beer,freedom}“, which both talk about costs to the /user/, not the maintainer.