[Its.an.education.project] Freedom is a good deal (Was: Ivan's latest blog entry on OLPC)

[Bernie Innocenti]

Martin Langhoff wrote:

> No quite :-) but, I've been through the "early linux"->"linux power
> user"->"pissed off by linux, got a powerbook"->"pissed off by OSX,
> back to linux" cycle.

Ah, me too!  My "OSX period" lasted almost 2 years, and yours?

I also had a 4-5 years Windows development period.  A prerequisite for me
to become profoundly disgusted by the whole proprietary software ecosystem.

It seems to me that new users who have grown in this golden era cannot
truly appreciate the amount of freedom they enjoy these days, after 10 years
of steady growth of FOSS have increasingly forced proprietary vendors away
from their worst practices. 

Who remembers daisy chaining 3 hardware dongles to my parallel port just
to use the software they needed at work?  And juggling a dozen different
CDs just to install everything they required to use a new computer?
Each time a machine would reboot, you'd get plenty of annoying splash
screens of which you couldn't get rid.  Not to mention searching for
cracks on astalavista so you could use a text editor and a zip archiver :-)

Believe it or not, this is how computers really looked like in the '90s,
when Microsoft was still dominating the (computing) world.

Now OSX is 80% open source, and Microsoft is forced to give away server
applications unencumbered with per-seat licenses.  Would this have
happened also without GNU, Linux, Apache, Samba...?  I doubt it.

Most users, especially the non technical ones, feel more comfortable using
a convenient mixture of free and proprietary software that solves their
immediate computing needs.  Fine, but they should be aware how much they
are actually benefiting from the efforts of thousands who stand still and
work on providing alternative solutions.

If Rob Savoye and his friends were content with using Adobe's Flash, now
we'd not have Gnash which works pretty decently, is portable to different
CPUs, and can start the movies paused by default (a nice anti-ad feature).
Check it out and help the Gnash hackers by reporting bugs or sending your
patches.

Freedom is not a theoretical issue.  It has very important practical
consequences too, but these are sometimes harder to see, even when they
are right in front of your nose.

Yes, freedom may not be for free... but it's usually a good investment.


-- 
   \___/
  _| X |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_O_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"