Comments on: +5, Insightful

By: Hubert

Hubert — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 12:14:11 +0000

I greet with all.

I would like to inform about started bounty on Swfdec, on next operating system
(Haiku):
http://www.haikuware.com/bounties/flash-port-bounty
Someone is interested for help or support?

By: Lucian

Lucian — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:28:50 +0000

Free software isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I disagree with the FSF on a number of points such as tivoisation and the very very badly chosen name (since free is a partial synonym to gratis in English).

Most people that know the difference between free software and open source are see the first as overly religious and the second as pleasantly practical. The free software movement is indeed bad a communicating its goals.

By: shirish

shirish — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:57:14 +0000

Interesting post and opinions but what I would like to know is what’s happening with swfdec. We saw a screenshot of swfdec 0.7.1 but no news after that. Are we seeing a new release soon? Looking forward to know more.

By: Drone

Drone — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:15:24 +0000

But as much as some people would like to insist that the Free Software movement is monolithic in nature, it has always been a heterogeneous collection of individuals with varying, overlapping, sometimes diverging beliefs and opinions — particularly when it comes to the rubber-meets-the-road subjects like advocacy and “goals”. It’s important to remember that, especially when you talk about goals — goals and principles aren’t the same thing. Principles are conceptual; goals are objectives. How you go from principle to goal is where most of the disagreements arise — including the “open source” term itself in particular.

By: otte

otte — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:30:34 +0000

Well, the Open Source movement pretty much does not exist anymore. One part of what made up that group – the Bruce Perens part – came to the conclusion, that promoting Open Source was wrong, and Free Software is the right term. The other part – the ESR part – left into irrelevance. So when people talk about Open Source these days, they mean the Free Software movement.

The point I was trying to make is that they don’t get this. They apply Open Source principles to software that was built with Free Software principles. (And yes, I include the Linux kernel here, the ideology of that project was pretty much shaped by people such as Alan Cox, GregKH or Harald Welte.) And this likely is because the important advantages of Free Software are advocated wrong. An example: The cool thing about modifiability is not “You can change it”, but “someone else will change it for you”. This is much more important for lots of people, but they don’t realize it, even though they use the catastrophes that are nspluginwrapper or flashblock.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:04:42 +0000

From the context (talking about the FSF), he’s confusing Free Software with Open Source, something pretty easy to get mixed up. Problem is that the latter idea is by far the more widely known, and it’s not always recognised that the former isn’t another term for the same thing. While FS has always stood for that ideal, OSS tends to be much more pragmatic, making the former’s stance hard to explain.

By: Chris Lord

Chris Lord — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:09:52 +0000

In fairness, he did say ‘open source’ and not ‘free and open source’, but he probably meant the latter.