You are currently browsing the A Sparse Array weblog archives for January, 2007.
January 28, 2007 by kastorff.
It’s not hard to find an opinion these days about the zen of open source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), led by Richard Stallman, pretty much has the stance that if it isn’t released with one of their licenses, it’s evil. Other entities, mostly companies like Microsoft, feel like they have the right to create, market, sell, and protect software as intellectual property. IMO, both perspectives have merit, if you strip away the self-serving interest of both camps, and look at things solely from the computer user’s perspective.
Computing isn’t a religion, a movement, or a cult of personality, like Richard Stallman would have it. He’s lost perspective, and it’s hard to separate the merit of his message from his overwhelming ego, but let’s give it a go.
Software should be free, open, and accessible to all. Anyone should be able to take software source code, modify it, enhance it, and return the benefits to its community of users.
That’s the meat and potatoes of the FSF message, stripped of the ego-baggage and legalese. It is, frankly, a beautiful concept, or ideology. The problem is, it’s not particularly practical as the only license model for software. Why? Because not everyone wants to use free software. Free doesn’t cost anything, so no one is responsible for making sure it works for you. That’s a risky proposition for a business. Sure there are companies like Red Hat and Novell, who would love to sell you Linux with support, but there’s a mix of software out there in the real world, and no business is an island. Microsoft Office is the defacto standard office suite. There are hundreds of thousands of man hours invested in training and use of Office. What platform runs Office best? It’s not Linux, whether one likes it or not.
In the end, ideology doesn’t mean much if it gets in the way of using your computer. I say find the software that does what you need it to do, and use it. Buy it if you have to, use free if you can, but just do what works best.
Posted in Technology | No Comments »